He’s also a target with a red X sewn onto the back of his jacket, lest he try to escape, and the camera often follows him from behind in remarkable tracking shots enhanced by an even more remarkable cacophony of ambient sounds. As a member of the Sonderkommando-Jewish prisoners forced to assist the Nazis in processing the remains of the doomed-Saul is a temporary trusty who will vanish in the ovens like all the other prisoners once his work tour is done. We’ve never before learned about a death camp’s workings through two meticulously detailed days in the life of such a man. The storytelling perspective is singular too. Nemes’s film attains an ineffable beauty. That’s when he sees a chance to perform a moral act in the midst of the madness, and when Mr. Saul Auslander (Gza Rhrig), a member of the camp’s Sonderkommandoprisoners forced to help the Nazis exterminate Jews, thereby delaying their own deaths for a few monthswalks toward the camera from far off in the woods before finally coming. The year is 1944 at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. His vision broadens only after he comes upon the corpse of a boy he chooses to think of as his son. Son of Saul begins with a long, unbroken shot of mesmerizing intricacy. We’re spared the worst of Auschwitz’s horror because the protagonist, a Hungarian named Saul Ausländer (a phenomenal performance by Géza Röhrig), is determined to keep what’s left of his sanity by focusing his gaze, and for a while his mind, on the ground in front of his feet and on whatever tasks may be at hand. Get a shot of inspiration with the FT Weekend bulletin - the best in life, arts and culture. The audience is not given any space to distance from Saul’s reality or turn it into an abstraction of suffering, innocence, or goodness the film doesn’t depict the story of the Holocaust in generic ways that would encourage getting lost in a historical account.
#Son of saul film review movie
“Son of Saul,” a great movie and a debut feature by László Nemes, summons up a world we may think we know from a visual perspective we’ve never encountered-the willed tunnel vision of a Jewish worker in a Nazi death camp. Son of Saul approaches its stupefying subject in a way that echoes Kierkegaard’s imperative.