Son of Saul
Saul fia

Hungarian director László Nemes sets his debut feature Son of Saul in the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Sonderkommando revolt of 1944.  While there have been countless movies about Nazi atrocities during WWII, this is the first feature I’ve seen that depicts the life of the Sonderkommando—special work units made up of death camp prisoners (usually Jews) who were forced to aid their German captors with the rounding up, gassing, burning, and disposing of Holocaust victims. Sonderkommando members were granted a slightly better and longer life in return for their work, but they still had no choice (other than suicide) but to obey their Nazi captors. Still, many Holocaust survivors and historians have reviled this group. When Auschwitz was liberated, the first thing the Soviet army did was to execute all the surviving Sonderkommando, accusing them of being collaborators and worse than the Nazis who forced them to assist in the mass-murder of their own people.

None of this information is explained in Nemes’ unsentimental and under-dramatized picture. Cinematographer Mátyás Erdély’s camera closely follows the protagonist, the nearly silent Saul Ausländer (played by the poet Géza Röhrig), as Saul goes about his work, participates in preparations for the revolt, and attempts to accomplish a personal mission of his own. The movie is extremely effective in terms of its tone, its ability to convey horrific details in a style that is palatable while not at all sugarcoated, and its capacity for evoking empathy for the Sonderkommando. Röhrig gives a remarkable performance. His face dominates nearly every frame of this movie and we experience the hell he witnesses through his blank reactions. Nemes expertly presents the internal workings of the death camp. The sights, sounds, and even smells are all inferred and somehow transmitted through Saul to us.

Son of Saul gets its visceral and historical points across clearly, but this is a none-the-less a rather contrived and frustrating picture. The story of the Sonderkommando revolt at Auschwitz is fascinating but I don’t think this limited, first person perspective is the best way to tell it. And the fictional narrative through-line that Nemes concocts about Saul’s search for spiritual deliverance feels overly cerebral and false. The character’s emotional arc is in direct conflict with the harsh realities depicted on screen rather than a profound counterpoint to them. Perhaps if there had already been several traditional films about this specific subject, the more poetic take of Son of Saul would have a greater impact. Or perhaps, like the previous year’s Birdman or the same year’s Victoria, this is a movie where the central cinematic conceit overpowers the story and themes. Either way, when dealing with subject matter of this nature it feels wrong for style to come before substance.