SON OF SAUL was the winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes and is a lock for Best Foreign Film at this year’s Academy Awards. If there is any justice in the world, it would cross over to be nominated for Best Picture too. But that almost doesn’t matter, because it is a film whose influence will be felt for not just the next year or so, but for decades. It is timeless, and yet manages to be simultaneously innovative. This is exactly the kind of film taught in film schools for the new things it brings to cinema, and yet it isn't ponderous or academic. On the contrary, it is like a punch to the gut, and it achieves a kind of haunting of the soul. I find it astounding that this is Hungarian director László Nemes’s first feature, and lead actor Géza Röhrig’s first acting job. They have created a masterpiece.
This is a Holocaust story, but one unlike anything you’ve seen before. The entire film is from the point of view of one person, Saul, a Sonderkommando at Auchwitz-Birkenau. These were the Jews pressed into service to run the day to day machinery of death. They led other Jews into the gas chambers, gathered their belongings, burned the bodies, and cleaned everything for the process to begin again. They were given preferential treatment compared to other prisoners, but they were also killed after a few months since they knew too many secrets.
Quite a few things make SON OF SAUL innovative, but chief among them is the unrelenting focus on the protagonist and his immediate surroundings. Every shot is either of him, or from his point of view. Many of the shots are close-ups on Saul’s face, and are shot in short focus so that the surroundings are blurred out. We only hear what he hears, and only see what he sees. It is nearly a first-person perspective. The whole film feels like one extended take. It isn’t, but there are long, extended stretches of unbroken shots.
Focusing on a single character so closely may seem tedious at first. And it is. But then it becomes hypnotic. Then it becomes profound. We reflexively want the camera to pan around to show us what is going on. Who is Saul talking to? What is he seeing? Hundreds of people are being murdered, at least give us a clear shot. But by subverting our expectations Nemes achieves magic. We realize there is no omniscient storyteller here — instead we are stuck in the mire like everyone else about to be murdered. This is also a crime so horrific that to pan across thousands of bodies would actually cause the audience to disconnect — it is far more gruesome to track it on a human scale. But at the same time, so many deaths are going on in the background that you start to see it as the character does — a constant, relentless drumbeat that must be tuned out to survive.
A second fresh perspective in SON OF SAUL is telling the story of the Sonderkommando. While the main character is fictional, the film was inspired by a book called Voices from Beneath the Ashes, texts written by some of the Sonderkommando, buried in the camps, and found later. In Holocaust films we usually get a heroic survivor’s tale of perseverance. Perhaps that is the only way we can take horror in such high doses. But that’s a form of mythology, and statistically speaking, it doesn’t tell the typical story. Here we get the perspective of the truly damned. This has some profound follow-on effects. There aren’t heroes here, just people trying to survive, with various attitudes on the spectrum from resignation to rebellion. It also means that we experience firsthand a nearly taboo subject — the actual day-to-day operation of a death camp.
The actual narrative of SON OF SAUL is simple. Saul witnesses a boy who initially survives the gas chamber, but ultimately dies. He wants to give the boy a proper burial, and goes to great lengths to do so, risking his own life and those of everyone around him. Saul isn’t particularly religious, and has no special relationship to this boy. And yet, it is somehow driven to do it.
At first, I found this conceit maddening — this guy is willing to risk the lives of the still-living just to have a rabbi put a spell on a dead body? He even jeopardizes a planned rebellion with his myopia on this subject. It made me lose all respect for the main character. But then started to realize that this is the point. He’s not, in fact, a hero. He’s just a guy trying to control one little part of this world while drowning in a sea of nightmares that he is helpless to stop. He’s trying to pull shreds of dignity from the abyss. A brilliant effect of this device is that introduces a kind of “man on a mission” plot engine — Saul must go to many parts of the camp in attempting to achieve his goal, and we see how the whole thing works, and how he interacts with everyone from those about to die on up to the camp’s commanders.
I cannot overstate the overwhelming sense of being there that SON OF SAUL conveys. Partly this is due to extraordinary historical accuracy and exhaustive research on the part of the filmmakers. The sets, costumes, and props are all meticulously rendered. But it is also due the the almost found-footage feeling conjured by the idea of following only the main character. This is reinforced by the use of a single lens throughout the film an no attempt to shoot anything in a beautiful way. Don’t despair though — this is no teenage shaky cam nonsense. it was shot on film, and great care was put into each shot. The extraordinary sound design completes the illusion — we are constantly surrounded by multiple overlapping sounds as Saul wades through the chaos.
Finally, I have to commend Géza Röhrig for a standout performance as Saul. He’s in every shot, and huge stretches of the film are centered on his face. I don’t know how he managed to achieve a kind of masterful understatement in a film so powerful, but he did. Through much of the running time he seems worn and emotionless, though we know it is because he’s trying to survive. We are always feeling much more powerful emotions than he is showing, because this is all new to us. Yet he has the kind of face that lets you read everything in.
SON OF SAUL doesn’t come out in theaters until December 18, but it has played and is playing at quite a few film festivals. Despite the difficult subject matter, see it. It is a art at its finest, it will shock you on first viewing and stay with you forever.
-Copernicus (aka Andy Howell). Email me or follow me on Twitter.
