In his riveting first film, “Son of Saul,” Hungarian director Laszlo Nemes touches on an agonizing array of Holocaust issues. The movie plays this weekend at the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center, and a panel discussion, co-sponsored by the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center, will follow at a future screening, to be announced next week.
Saul Auslander, played with haunting eyes by Hungarian-born Geza Rohrig, is a Hungarian Jew imprisoned at Germany’s Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in 1944, near the end of World War II. As a member of the Sonderkommandos, units of inmates forced to conduct prisoners into Nazi gas chambers and clean up afterward in exchange for better rations and delay of their own executions, he participates in unspeakable horrors. In a reflection of the unspeakable, Saul does not utter a word until more than seven minutes into the film, nor does he rely much on speech later on.
In the aftermath of a round of executions, Saul discovers among the naked bodies a boy who has somehow remained alive — until a doctor who happens to be a prisoner himself finishes him off. Claiming the boy is his son, Saul determines he must find a way to give him a proper Jewish funeral. Saul also belongs to a group of inmates planning an escape, who in turn impede him or help him find a rabbi to conduct the boy’s funeral. Such are the bare bones of “Son of Saul,” a narrative that is as painfully fractured and chaotic as reality can be.
The camera locks onto Saul’s face, with all its agony, in extreme close-ups. The viewer sees only what Saul sees, and the evil being perpetrated is muted by its appearance, often out of focus, in the background. The director incorporates many additional cinematic devices to convey the internal hell that a death camp inmate like Saul must have experienced. Rather than a digital format, Mr. Nemes relies on traditional, higher-resolution 35mm film, and the old Academy frame size that is more box-like and fittingly claustrophobic than the widescreen in common use today. He uses handheld cameras and extended shots of Saul. In the soundtrack, background noises ranging from screams and groans, squeaking or rumbling machinery, to dogs barking or even birdsong, barrage the viewer, along with a jumble of often indecipherable languages — German, Hungarian, and Yiddish to name a few.
“Schnell,” the German verb for hurry, looms repeatedly out of the sonic welter and emphasizes cinematically a thriller-like urgency. Moral ambiguities — questions about Saul’s role as a Sonderkommando, whether the boy is really his son, and whether he is sacrificing the living for the dead — reverberate. There is little doubt that the film intends Saul’s struggle as a form of moral redemption, reinforced by the ending. Viewers must decide for themselves whether that ending is justified, or if it sentimentalizes the story.
Critic A.O. Scott has called “Son of Saul” a tour de force of suspense. Of the director he says, “His skill is undeniable, but also troubling. The movie offers less insight than sensation, an emotional experience that sits too comfortably within the norms of entertainment.” He terms the Holocaust “safe and familiar ground” for movies.
Considering the shocking number of genocides whose stories go inadequately recorded, how sad to think the film industry has reduced the Holocaust to a relatively safe exemplar.
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