Through his use of shallow focus and protracted, lingering takes, Hungarian director László Nemes presents the horrors of the Holocaust through the interactions of a single man in his superb debut feature, Son of Saul. With the camera perpetually focused on the reactions of his titular protagonist, the awful events he witnesses are often seen (and heard) at the periphery of the frame.
Géza Röhrig is Saul, a Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, and member of the Sonderkommando – a group responsible for leading fellow prisoners into the gas chambers, clearing out and disposing of the bodies afterwards. In exchange for their grim task, they are awarded measly privileges and a modicum of power over their fellow prisoners.
Saul’s stoicism is broken when, amongst the corpses of one condemned group, he discovers a boy he believes to be his son, still breathing and barely clinging on to life. After a brief examination and suffocation by a Nazi doctor, Saul’s sole ambition turns towards giving his son a proper burial. His unwavering attention to this task presents the main subject of the film, as he risks both his own life and those of other members of the Sonderkommando to retrieve the body, find a rabbi and carry out the burial.
The moment serves to reconnect Saul, who one assumes has taken his place in the Sonderkommando to increase his own chances of survival, with the religion for which he is being persecuted. Though in the most miserable of circumstances, he has been actively engaged in assisting the Third Reich in murdering his brothers and sisters, something his vacant face suggests he has become numb too. Dehumanised by the Nazis, stripped down to his bare animalistic nature of striving to stay alive, the act of burying his son serves as a moral crusade to regain his humanity, his identity and his faith.
The method of presenting Saul’s experience is genius, as Nemes’ steadfastly sticks to showing his protagonist’s perspective. Everything we see, hear and feel comes through the prism of his often-expressionless gaze as the barbaric realization of Hell on Earth swirls on around him. It’s reminiscent of Elie Wiesel’s haunting novel Night, in giving a solitary, subjective and humanistic viewpoint on a point in history unthinkably vast in scope.
It is unlike any film about the Holocaust I’ve seen before, stripping away the larger focus of a sustained, brutal attack on an entire group of people and showing only the spiritual and physical assault on one man. We’re not spoon fed with exposition and establishing shots, but dropped into the middle of Saul’s personal hell, and carried brutishly throughout his nightmarish endeavors.
While by its very nature, the Holocaust is a subject too atrocious and mammoth to comprehend in its entirety, Son of Saul is incredibly effective in exhibiting what it was in its essence: the physical, emotional and psychological devastation of individuals. Nemes’ sublime film finds a fresh way of exploring life in the concentration camps, both challenging the traditional cinematic methods of exploring the subject and creating one of the most unflinching, devastatingly effective representations of the Holocaust ever created.
Son of Saul will be shown at Broadway Cinema until Thursday 12 May 2016.
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