Son of Saul (Sony Pictures Classics, 2015)
Leaving the theater where I saw László Nemes’s brilliant, relentlessly brutal Holocaust drama, Son of Saul (2015), I mentioned to a woman how difficult I thought the film was to watch. She replied, “Yes, but…” and gave a sad look accompanied by a shrug that seemed to say “but that’s the way it is.” That shrug and that expression, simultaneously conveying defeat and the sincere desire not to be defeated, were as accurate a review as possible for representing the spirit of Son of Saul—an important film in which vicious brutality reigns supreme as the smallest seed of meaning and purpose fights quixotically to take root.
Saul, a Hungarian Jew, is part of a group of prisoners in Auschwitz who are forced to assist in the mass murder of their own people. A brief historical explanation that precedes the film’s incomparably devastating opening sequence explains that these workers were also eventually murdered. As they clean the gas chambers of their unspeakable carnage, Saul observes a young boy who barely survived the mass execution. For the first few sequences of the film, we only see tight close-ups of Saul’s face; the first shot that parts from this visual idea is one of the now-dead boy. A cut back to Saul makes us realize immediately, more than any didactic dialogue ever could, how important this boy suddenly becomes to him; Saul makes it his dangerous mission to see that, somehow, the boy receives a traditional Jewish burial.
A scene from Schindler’s List (1993) that always stuck with me was the one in which prisoners of a Nazi camp are fearfully led into a shower, only to discover to their relief that water—and not gas—is coming from the showerheads. Those hoping for such scenes of reprieve in Son of Saul will not see any; the violence and cruelty in Nemes’s astounding debut are arbitrary and uncompromising. Spielberg’s movie, as good as it is, is a melodrama; Nemes’s movie plays like an experience actually being lived amidst unrelenting, ubiquitous terror.
Much of the reason Son of Saul feels like a lived experience can be attributed to lead actor Géza Röhrig. He gives an astonishing performance. Son of Saul uses a square aspect ratio, so Röhrig’s face fills the entire screen for a majority of the movie. In the corners of the screen, we can see out-of-focus corpses and beatings and shootings, but what we mostly see is Saul’s face, a face that manages to be expressionless amidst de rigueur violence while also beautifully exhibiting both the fatigue that the atrocities have caused and the slight traces of determined resolve to do something that means something in such a meaningless place.
Son of Saul (Sony Pictures Classics, 2015)
Thinking about this face, clear and simple, framed in a modest square as scenes of terror abound in the blurry background, it becomes clear what a moral and aesthetic vision Son of Saul really is. What must have been intricately staged scenes of cleaning out the gas chambers, of hard labor in the camps, of escapees’ flight through the woods ultimately serve as blurry tone setters—the man trying to create his own meaning in hell steadfastly remains the film’s main point of interest.
And to make this parable of a film even richer (without making it feel cluttered), Nemes and co-writer Clara Royer weaved in a plot in which Saul’s fellow workers, knowing that the Nazis plan on disposing of them, organize a rebellion and escape. These prisoners must be as covert and unwavering as Saul, and the film doesn’t back down from weighing the morality of one hopeless quest against the other. In one thought-provoking moment, a prisoner accuses Saul of valuing the dead over the living—and he’s right: Saul is more or less guilty of this. But in a world where vicious murder is a foregone conclusion, which is more worthwhile to value? Son of Saul asks this question boldly and unflinchingly from beginning to end, and the thoughtful moviegoer—or citizen for that matter—practically has a responsibility to see it.
Author Biography
John Bennett is a recent graduate of Muhlenberg College (class of 2015), where he studied cinema, literature, and French. His piece on Visconti’s Senso appeared in The Valley Humanities Review, and his feature-length comedy, The Outer Loop (2013), was nominated for the Best Feature award at the Greater Lehigh Valley Filmmakers’ Festival. The full film can be seen at: https://vimeo.com/84655047
Film Details
Son of Saul (2015)
Hungary
Director László Nemes
Runtime 107 minutes
