Son of Saul

With his pow­er­ful debut fea­ture, Hun­gar­i­an direc­tor László Nemes uses a sin­gle blank face to con­vey the unspeak­able. His pro­tag­o­nist – the tit­u­lar Saul (Géza Röhrig) – is a mem­ber of the Son­derkom­man­do, a group of Jew­ish pris­on­ers who empy the gas cham­bers in the Auschwitz-Birke­nau con­cen­tra­tion camp in exchange for pal­try priv­i­leges dur­ing World War Two.

Through long takes and shal­low focus, the cam­era is per­ma­nent­ly trained on Röhrig’s face and, as the encir­cling hor­rors close in on the mar­gins of the frame, we can only process them through his expres­sion. In doing so, Nemes cap­tures the hor­rors of the tra­di­tion­al Holo­caust movie though the ques­tion­able impas­siv­i­ty of a sin­gle man.

This inge­nious tech­nique places the audi­ence in the pre­car­i­ous role of moral arbiter. What we project onto Saul depends not only on our reac­tion to the mate­r­i­al, but on our rela­tion­ship with this noto­ri­ous moment in his­to­ry. In this sense, Nemes strips the Holo­caust movie down to its most essen­tial ele­ment – a sus­tained attack on the human body and spir­it. The direc­tor trusts us to fill in the blanks – a bold propo­si­tion in the face of the film’s paralysing brute force.

At its core, Son of Saul is about the unwa­ver­ing pur­suit of a sin­gle act of decen­cy in the face of over­whelm­ing atroc­i­ty. As he clears out the gas cham­ber with his fel­low Son­derkom­man­do one day at the end of 1944, Saul finds the corpse of a boy he believes to be his son. Deter­mined to give him a prop­er bur­ial, he furtive­ly sets out on a search for a rab­bi to help car­ry out the deed. In a sit­u­a­tion where death is ubiq­ui­tous, the act of bur­ial is not only a human­is­ing rit­u­al stand­ing at odds with the degra­da­tion of the Third Reich; it con­nects Saul to his per­se­cut­ed reli­gion. It is an expres­sion of atone­ment, devo­tion and defiance.

This cen­tral idea of the bur­ial is the anchor in the tem­pest, offer­ing a clear moral tra­jec­to­ry through myr­i­ad hor­rors which can often threat­en to over­whelm it. Indeed, styl­is­ti­cal­ly, Son of Saul is cal­cu­lat­ed to stun. The cam­era chains us to Saul, but the sheer chaos of the world around him is omnipresent. The sound design is nau­se­at­ing­ly effec­tive, with the hellscape of the camp impos­ing itself as a cacoph­o­ny of screams, barks and the dis­tress­ing white noise of human suf­fer­ing. It is like being embalmed in a night­mare, engulfed in a fog of obscured hor­ror. The audi­ence is pum­melled by the vio­lence off cam­era, but Saul is our wit­ness. He sees every­thing and we see him.

The notion of the bur­ial – and the dif­fi­cult tasks required to ful­fil it – is what car­ries us through the mael­strom. As the tur­bu­lence hits you on a phys­i­cal and emo­tion­al lev­el, Nemes pierces through the clam­our by giv­ing the sto­ry a myth­i­cal bent. The idea of seek­ing a bur­ial for a loved one, for exam­ple, comes from the Greek myth Antigone.

Sim­i­lar­ly, the Son­derkom­man­do are men in pur­ga­to­ry, car­ry­ing out the devil’s busi­ness. They ush­er their brethren through the cham­bers to Hades. They are the con­duits between the liv­ing and the dead, and they bear the bur­den of watch­ing their peo­ple die. Nemes strips the role of the Son­derkom­man­do from its com­plex his­tor­i­cal con­text; his cin­e­ma is one of phys­i­cal force and pow­er­ful myth­i­cal imagery.

As a sub­jec­tive doc­u­ment of war, Samuel Fuller’s The Big Red One from 1980 serves as an inter­est­ing com­par­i­son piece. Both pic­tures con­front the enor­mi­ty of his­to­ry by focus­ing on the day-to-day lives of their pro­tag­o­nists. Fuller’s film, which car­ries the weight of anec­dote, acts as a fil­ter for the haze of his and star Lee Marvin’s own mem­o­ries of war. It is a great war film because it finds endur­ing truth in every­day minu­ti­ae. In tak­ing the sub­jec­tiv­i­ty a step fur­ther, Son of Saul appro­pri­ates the expe­ri­ence of one man to find the crux of a his­tor­i­cal moment which, in its scale and cru­el­ty, still seems beyond comprehension.

More broad­ly, the Holo­caust movie as a genre is about rec­on­cil­ing the per­son­al with the his­tor­i­cal, seek­ing under­stand­ing by pro­ject­ing small sto­ries against the wider sociopo­lit­i­cal nar­ra­tive. In eschew­ing this approach, Nemes is able to locate the har­row­ing essence of the Holo­caust – the degra­da­tion and destruc­tion of human beings. Son of Saul could be seen as an effort to unshack­le cin­e­ma from the tra­di­tion­al Holo­caust nar­ra­tive and, in turn, cap­ture the core of the 20^th century’s great­est atroc­i­ty. In this sense, Nemes’ method chal­lenges the cin­e­mat­ic rep­re­sen­ta­tions of the Holo­caust, which, beyond the aus­tere, unflinch­ing eye, is the picture’s great­est strength.