Directed by:
László NemesCinematography:
Mátyás ErdélyComposer:
László MelisCast:
Géza Röhrig, Levente Molnár, Urs Rechn, Todd Charmont, Jerzy Walczak, Balázs Farkas, Gergő Farkas, Sándor Zsótér, Marcin Czarnik, Levente Orbán (more)VOD (1)
Plots(1)
Saul Ausländer is a Hungarian member of the Sonderkommando, the group of Jewish prisoners isolated from the camp and forced to assist the Nazis in the machinery of large-scale extermination. While working in one of the crematoriums, Saul discovers the body of a boy he takes for his son. As the Sonderkommando plans a rebellion, Saul decides to carry out an impossible task: save the child's body from the flames, find a rabbi to recite the mourner's Kaddish and offer the boy a proper burial. (Sony Pictures DE)
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Reviews (12)
A movie without the past and the future, which will be (not only because of this) described as a holocaust-style Come and See (1985). Thanks to the chosen format of "long scenes over the shoulder", it is unusually intense, suggestive (amazing sound work!) and gets under you skin very quickly and for a long time. Maybe too much, because it's constantly moving and it is so dynamic that the viewer (nor the character) will be sitting on the edge of his char all the time. What can happen is that the viewer becomes used to it by the end of the movie, although the horrors during the Sonderkommando shift are shown "seemingly accidentally", are sidelined and presented as a daily routine. But as a result it is even more terrifying and disturbing. No matter whether you become used to it or not and whether you can get over it or not, it is indisputable that Saul's son is one of the exceptions confirming the rule that the film's qualities and the importance and urgency of the theme form one functional unit, which rightfully deserves "festival fame". If nothing else, it is because such a view of the film depiction of the Holocaust through the industrialization of death was desperately needed, because although these events are captured in literature from time to time they are almost never depicted in a movie.
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The wiping of vomit and blood and the removal of fresh corpses from the just-used gas chamber, the precisely organized loading of those corpses into furnaces, the constant dumping of ashes into the river; people reduced to mere numerical units, "pieces", worthless waste – killing as a manufacturing process. Killing as a perfectly lubricated and thought-out machine, whose puppets and operators in one – sonderkommando – have prolonged their lives by at least a few months, and who carry the corpses with complacency, without emotions and emotional outpourings (what else is left for them), as if they were operating a machine tool. And in that darkness of inhumanity and filth, like a faint glimmer of humanity, there’s the desire of one of the sonderkommando to bury – as civilized society should – one dead boy. A film that everyone should watch. Especially the fucked up Nazi dumbasses, who I'm under no illusions would be moved, but if even just one in a thousand said to themselves "God, what an asshole I am!", this movie would make sense. Only an idiot can "get bored" or "fall asleep", as I have read here a few times, with this overwhelming experience.
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A very authentical portrayal of the hell of a concentration camp that focuses on the Sonderkommando, auxiliary Jews who send other Jews to the gas chambers and also to the ovens. What annoyed me was the main character, as the camera took close-ups of his face quite often and he wasn't a very pretty sight to look at, which might still be passable if he didn't also annoy me with his behaviour, as he spends the whole film looking for a rabbi and wanting to bury his son, and that didn't sit right with me as the central plot. If the film had focused more on the riot or shown footage of the gas chambers or the ovens, it could have been a competition to A Serbian Film. Still, this is a disturbing film from a horrific setting and I don't envy anyone who had to endure it. The unconventional cinematography is interesting. Decent, but I could imagine it being better.70%
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I quite enjoyed the inner conflict of the main character in the first half because I actually experienced it too. I wondered for a long time if it was rational to devote my energy to a dead child in such moving circumstances ("because of the dead you forgot about the living"), only to realize later that the central character often really doesn't give a damn about any rationality. Son of Saul is an extremely intimate portrait of a broken man for whom the self-destructive and quite obviously irrational (given the situation) need for a ritualistic act becomes the only life purpose. The extremely evocative POV cinematography and (thankfully) mostly out-of-focus shots of human carnage are quite disturbing, and the atmosphere of pervasive evil and death radiates from the screen in a way that's not pretty. [80%]
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(BE2CAN, Lucerna) I’m doubting between four, in recognition for its merits, and three for the experience. After all the hype from Cannes I was expecting more. It’s a different take on the monstrous machinery of the Holocaust from the point of view of a poor bastard who gets mixed up in it. The intention is clear, the execution is undoubtedly appropriate, but I’m not sure it’s enough for me in 107 minutes…
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Gallery (22)
Photo © Laokoon Filmgroup
![Son of Saul - Photos](http://image.pmgstatic.com/cache/resized/w663/files/images/film/photos/163/420/163420805_e99808.jpg)
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