He must do this in a series of furtive, enigmatic whispers with prisoners who are trying to concentrate on a planned uprising, using what they call “shiny” as bribes for information and material: valuables taken at enormous risk from the bodies of the dead. Here is where Saul discovers the body of a boy, whom he believes to be his son, and sets out to find a rabbi among the prisoners to give him a proper burial. With staggering audacity, Son of Saul begins with something other, comparable movies would hardly dare approach even at the very end – the gas chamber itself. The horrendous reality of bodies, uniforms, muzzle flashes is glimpsed at the edges, often out of focus
They are bit-part players in a theatre of horror. They must manage the day-to-day business of herding bewildered prisoners out of the trains and up to the very doors of the gas chambers and then removing the bodies, the chief task being to pacify the victims in advance with their simple presence, silently shoring up the Nazi soldiers’ reassuring lies about these being simply showers. Saul, played by the 48-year-old Hungarian actor Géza Röhrig, is a Jewish prisoner who has been made part of the Sonderkommando, inmates given tiny, temporary privileges in return for policing their own extermination. Son of Saul reopens the debate around the Holocaust and its cinematic thinkability, addresses the aesthetic and moral issues connected with creating a fiction within it and probes the nature of Wittgenstein’s axiom “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent”.
This film would be an achievement for anyone, but for a first-time feature director it is stunning – something to compare with Elem Klimov’s Come and See. The experience of evil and the experience of being in hell are what are offered by this devastating and terrifying film by László Nemes, set in the Auschwitz II-Birkenau death camp in 1944.
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