One of the key achievements of “Son of Saul” is that without deviating from Saul’s perspective, it succeeds in mapping out an intricate network of relationships among the Sonderkommandos, the Oberkapos (their superior officers) and the SS guards (two of whom are played by Uwe Lauer and Christian Harting). 7, 1944), and it will require Saul to defy captors and collaborators alike, resorting to all manner of manipulation, blackmail, fast thinking and quick, decisive action.
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It’s an unthinkably dangerous, foolhardy objective, especially on the eve of a long-planned prisoner uprising (situating the film’s action right around Oct. The child is quickly put to death, but Saul, for reasons hinted at by the title but not explained until later, can neither look away from his face nor allow him to be cut open by a doctor (Sandor Zsoter), as official regulations dictate. From that point onward, Saul will have only one goal: not to survive or escape, but to find a rabbi who can give the boy a proper Jewish burial. Notably, however, Saul is no aimless wanderer but rather a man on a mission, spurred into action when he finds that a young boy has somehow survived the gas.
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The experience of watching “Son of Saul,” then, is not unlike that of navigating the inner circles of Dante’s Inferno with the Dardenne brothers (at least during the extreme-ear-cam phase that produced 2003’s “The Son”). It’s a perfect visual representation of a mental state that has long since absorbed the unthinkable. Meanwhile, the shallow-focus compositions and the use of the Academy aspect ratio have the effect of placing Saul’s head at the center of the almost square frame, while the action behind him - including, pointedly, most of the violence and nudity that another film might have foregrounded - remains an out-of-focus blur. Their decision to shoot on 35mm film stock lends the images an immense tactility and subtle richness of color, even within the squalid, shadowy camp interiors (as expertly re-created by production designer Laszlo Rajk). One of the film’s scrupulously observed ground rules, then, is that we will see only what Saul sees, and Nemes and his gifted cinematographer Matyas Erdely fully commit to this persistence-of-vision tactic by filming in long, unbroken handheld shots that can last for minutes (the film’s clearest debt to the ascetic style of Hungarian master Bela Tarr, for whom Nemes served as an assistant director on 2007’s “The Man From London”). It’s typical of the ruthlessness of the film’s approach that we first encounter Saul on the job, as he and his fellow workers come alongside a group of new arrivals and steer them into the “undressing room.” The discretion and matter-of-factness of the horror only makes it that much more unsettling: We hear screams briefly issuing forth from the gas chambers, but the camera doesn’t venture inside until afterward, when Saul and the others are dutifully removing the bodies and scrubbing down the walls and floors in preparation for the next group.
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Nemes’ film, by contrast, distinguishes itself in both its verisimilitude and its unrelenting focus on one individual, Saul Auslander (Geza Rohrig, making his own exceptional screen debut), a Hungarian Jewish man who works with a Sonderkommando unit at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The wretched fate of these custodians of death - their uniquely up-close perspective on the workings of the Final Solution and the unspeakable guilt they suffered for their participation - was addressed earlier in not only “Shoah” but also Tim Blake Nelson’s “The Grey Zone” (2001), which starred David Arquette as an American-accented Jewish captive in an ensemble drama too archly stylized for its own good. Not for nothing does the story center around a fictional member of the Sonderkommandos, those Jewish workers who were forced to assist in the mass murder and disposal of their own, delaying their own executions by mere months. Boldly courting the kind of debate about how (or whether) the Nazi death camps should be depicted that dates back at least as far as Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah” (1985), “Son of Saul” is likely to draw admiration and outrage alike: Does its uncompromising restraint and formal rigor serve as a corrective to the sensationalism and sentimentality favored by Hollywood, or does it merely substitute one form of exploitation for another? To the credit of Nemes (who co-scripted with Clara Royer), his immersive yet powerfully withholding film is clearly built for, and comfortable with, a measure of moral ambiguity.