Son of Saul
Directed by: László Nemes
Written by: László Nemes, Clara Royer
Starring: Géza Röhrig, Levante Molnar, Urs Rechn, Sándor Zsotér, Jerzy Walczak
Drama/History/Thriller - 107 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 12 Jan 2015
Written by: László Nemes, Clara Royer
Starring: Géza Röhrig, Levante Molnar, Urs Rechn, Sándor Zsotér, Jerzy Walczak
Drama/History/Thriller - 107 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 12 Jan 2015
His name is Saul Ausländer. I assume this is not his given name because it literally means ‘Outlander’ in German; a surname quite at odds with his Jewish Hungarian roots. Get comfortable looking at Saul because his face and the back of his head are the only focal points you’re going to get for the next 107 minutes. We immediately figure out where we are because in the background and off to the sides are piles of naked corpses stacked up in a gas chamber. It is 1944 and we are in Auschwitz-Birkenau. First time feature director László Nemes tackles a well-covered but harrowing subject and setting and chooses a manner we have never seen before to film it. This is not a survivor story; you will find no heroes either. Son of Saul is about a man, his mission, and his singular point of view. There is no wider scope and no broader vision; just one man’s situation and experience.
Son of Saul has a lot of wind at its back. It won the Cannes Film Festival’s Grand Prix, its second highest award, the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film, and is Hungary’s entry for the 2016 Best Foreign Film category. Saul is one of the few Sonderkommando, a Jew the SS makes run their death factory. Saul helps herd in the latest cattle car of arrivals, ushers them to the ‘showers’, informs everyone to remember the peg number where they hang their clothes, and carts away the ‘pieces’, as everyone refers to the corpses, after the shower. The audience gathers all of this information from bits and pieces. We only see Saul’s immediate surroundings, never a pull back or a breather from Saul’s face, neck, and upper body as it fills the frame almost the entire time.
Son of Saul has a lot of wind at its back. It won the Cannes Film Festival’s Grand Prix, its second highest award, the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film, and is Hungary’s entry for the 2016 Best Foreign Film category. Saul is one of the few Sonderkommando, a Jew the SS makes run their death factory. Saul helps herd in the latest cattle car of arrivals, ushers them to the ‘showers’, informs everyone to remember the peg number where they hang their clothes, and carts away the ‘pieces’, as everyone refers to the corpses, after the shower. The audience gathers all of this information from bits and pieces. We only see Saul’s immediate surroundings, never a pull back or a breather from Saul’s face, neck, and upper body as it fills the frame almost the entire time.
It is unclear how long Saul has been a Sonderkommando; however, he has been escorting live people and cleaning up bodies long enough to know all the nooks and crannies of the camp and to develop an overt thousand yard stare. Saul’s particular purpose is a divisive plot strategy. He recognizes a boy who somehow survives the gas as his own son. There is nothing Saul can do as a Nazi overseer suffocates the boy to death, but now Saul has a mission. He will protect the boy’s body, find a rabbi to say Kaddish, and bury him. Saul finds his morality and solace in this single-minded pursuit, yet, it impacts a larger attempt at rebellion and escape. Many might find the whole enterprise pointless.
László Nemes happened across the book “Voices from Beneath the Ashes” published by the Shoah Foundation. The book is comprised of first-hand Sonderkommando accounts of daily life in the camp which was buried and hidden before the all too real 1944 uprising and was then dug up after the war. A part of Nemes’s family was murdered at Auschwitz and Holocaust film tales of survival and heroism frustrated the director. Why not a story of the actual death machine creating thousands of corpses every single day? However, notice that even though Nemes is intent on showing the detailed process of execution, we never go inside the gas chamber once the doors are shut. We stay outside with Saul. Nemes says some things cannot be filmed.
If Saul doesn’t see it, we don’t see it. Cinematographer Mátyás Erdély shot on 35mm film rather than with the gloss and polish of digital, remains at Saul’s eye level, and employs a restricted aspect ratio. Erdély did something quite similar with James White, a film he shot concerning a stressed out New York twenty-something coping with a dying mother and a dozen other problems. The camera was practically up James’s nose the entire time. Now that I have seen two Erdély shot films, he certainly has branded himself with a calling card. There is a lot of writing in defense of Son of Saul about how this in your face style and single point of view narrative is not a gimmick, so much so, that it sometimes ends up feeling like a gimmick.
Saul’s journey circulates him throughout the entire Auschwitz mechanism, a bit too clever and perhaps impossible. Saul works the gas chambers but also schemes his way to the ovens, the coal pit, the river where they dump the ashes, the women’s workhouse, and a mass grave trench where Nazis incorporate the one bullet to one head method. One major success for Nemes was who he cast to play Saul, a man named Géza Röhrig. Röhrig is not an actor; he is a Hungarian writer and poet living in New York. He is also completely believable and excellent at portraying a man either blinded by a solemn mission or cracked up inside and broken psychologically. It’s up to the audience to make their own decisions whether or not the boy is Saul’s son, but perhaps it doesn’t even matter. At Auschwitz in 1944, the world went insane; no one can blame Saul for doing the same thing.
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