Son of Saul (2015)

                “Son of Saul” is an addition to the Holocaust subgenre of war movies.  You may be wondering what more can be done with this prolific subgenre, but “Son of Saul” proves there is still life left in Holocaust films.  It is a Hungarian film by Laszlo Nemes, who co-wrote the screenplay.  Although the movie is fictional, he did extensive research, especially from “The Scrolls of Auschwitz”.  That work is the first person accounts of Sonderkommandos.  He also had Holocaust experts as technical advisers.  The movie was lauded by Elie Weisel and Claude Lanzmann, the director of “Shoah”.  The movie was awarded the Grand Prix at Cannes and won for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards.  It also won the Golden Globe.

                The movie opens with a definition for “Sonderkommando” for those who aren’t familiar with this Holocaust term.  Or for those who have not seen “The Grey Zone”.  Each death camp had these units which consisted of male prisoners who were allowed to live a little longer and given preferential treatment in exchange for working the gas chambers.  The movie focuses on one of them, Saul Auslander (Geza Rohrig).  He is on screen almost all the time.  The movie is very intimate.  The movie opens with a sensory-assaulting scene of the Jews being loaded onto a train.  Not original, but in this case the cinematography is disconcertingly out of focus.  The blurriness is balanced by a cacophony of sounds realistic to the scene.  A baby cries, a dog barks, the train lets out steam, there is a band playing.  This style continues into the gas chamber.  We have to use sounds to fill in for what is not shown.  This movie expects a lot from its viewers.  Saul’s job is to check the corpses for valuables, remove the bodies, and then clean the floor.  He is dispassionate about it. He has stowed away his humanity, but then it returns when he witnesses a Nazi doctor suffocating a young boy who had miraculously survived the gas.  Saul makes it his mission to work around the system to give the child a decent burial.  This will require a rabbi.  Saul takes incredible chances and goes through a series of adventures to try to achieve his goal.  His quest for a rabbi results in his involvement with shoveling ashes into the local river and the disposal of a shipment of Jews via a pit.  This scene in particular is one of the most realistically horrific in Holocaust film history.  The sounds and glimpses of sights set it apart.  While he is on his quest,  Saul is also caught up in a rebellion led by the Sonderkommandos.

                “Son of Saul” is mesmerizing tour de force of cinematography and sound.  The sound design took five months and included eight different languages.  Cinematographer Matyas Erdely mixes shallow focus with deep focus and liberal use of out of focus.  The gas chamber scene features a two minute take followed by a three minute one.  There are a lot of close-ups, especially of Saul.  Rohrig is great with facial expressions.  It was his feature film debut and he dominates.  He should have been nominated for Best Actor at the Academy Awards.  His Saul is no saint.  You have to wonder if his obsession is detrimental to the greater good.  No other character makes much of an impression although there are some interesting people that Saul encounters.  The movie has no villain.  The Holocaust is the villain.  Saul is put in a Hell on Earth and fights it as best he can.  Through Saul we see some aspects of the Holocaust that are rarely seen in a Holocaust movie.  However, when it comes to the two historical incidents covered in the film  (the finding of a live child in the gas chamber and the rebellion of the Sonderkommandos), the movie does not instruct much.  It uses those true events to tell the story of the fictional Saul.  The movie is so focused on him that it is hard to figure out what the bigger picture is.  For that reason, the movie needs to be paired with “The Grey Zone”.  Don’t watch one without seeing the other.  Watch them back to back if you want to overdose on depressing.

                “Son of Saul” falls just short of being a great movie.  It does have some predictability in its unique plot.  Saul is unrealistically lucky and his quest seems too easy at times.  It loses some credibility towards the end.  However, those are minor quibbles for a movie that is a must-see.

GRADE  =  A