A controlled plunging into the abyss, Son Of Saul is a Hungarian film set in the concentration camp of Auschwitz. Or precisely, it is largely set in the horrific slaughterhouse of the gas chambers in which Jewish prisoners are horded by the trainload. What sets this film apart — what makes it one of the most acclaimed and yet divisive films of last year, as well as a front-runner at the Oscar on Sunday — is the visual strategy and conceptual representation of that European tragedy.
Son Of Saul is told entirely from the point of view of one Jewish man, Saul (Geza Rohrig), member of the Sonderkommando, a group of Jewish men forced by the Nazis to help them carry out the ghastly work of killing Jews, cleaning off their jewellery, burning their corpses in funeral pyres, and shovelling the ashes into the river.
Almost the entire film, we're stuck close to Saul — very close, in fact, with the camera hovering just behind his head as he rushes around the camp, while the extremely shallow focus blurs out everything else except our man. Saul, in the foreground, works in the dimly-lit abattoir of the extermination room, while the piles of naked corpses and blood and nameless limbs are glimpsed in the background. Among the dead, Saul discovers the body of a boy whom he believes to be his son (though maybe he's not) and Saul sets out on a mission to find a rabbi to perform a proper burial. The set-up is meant for extreme irony, or for a quest of spiritual humanity. With a few thousands corpses disposed like trash around him, Saul wants a religious funeral for one.
You can’t take your eyes off the screen. This is an efficient thriller, a fast-paced adventure story set amid the screams of horror and a bonfire of hell, and that’s precisely why it is also disturbing: should we have a thriller based on the Holocaust? Does the calculating, stylish scheme of the film spectacularise the raw crime of such magnitude?
Son Of Saul, directed by the extremely talented Laszlo Nemes, uses what a friend called a “video game” perspective — we see what Saul sees as he walks around the maze of the camp — and the concept verges on sensationalising the experience. The case of Son Of Saul has dug up the decades-old discourse proposed by Jean-Luc Godard about the morality of trying to film a Holocaust and whether the event is even “representable”; also, it evokes the classic essay by the late Jacques Rivette that condemned a tracking shot in the 1959 Italian film Kapo, in which the camera moves in to capture the hand of a dead victim in a concentration camp. Rivette, a critic and celebrated filmmaker, wrote that the man who came up with that shot deserves nothing but “profound contempt”. (On the contrary Claude Lanzmann, director of one of the best post-Holocaust films Shoah, praised the film).
Nemes, the director, compounded the debate when he said in Cannes last May that “it’s important to talk to this generation”, implying that 70 years after World War II ended, the wounds still hurt though they’re no longer fresh, and contemporary artists will have to find ways to preserve the memory of that historical horror that might be different from those who lived in its immediate shadows of the post-war years.
For me, I think Son Of Saul tries a little too hard, its mechanism too obvious, and the film can also feel like a manipulative pummeling. There's no denying that this is a masterclass of tight, precise filmmaking, with every shot technically composed to achieve the overwhelming effect of horror, from the near-stampede at the mass graves, the howling victims horded into the chambers. But if Son Of Saul wanted us to find a faint glimpse of humanity in what looks and feels like hell, we didn't.
