Hungarian director László Nemes makes his directorial debut with the WWII drama Son of Saul. The title’s Saul (Géza Röhrig), a Sonderkommando—which were Jewish concentration camp prisoners forced to assist Nazis in the death chambers—searches Auschwitz-Birkenau for a rabbi to deliver a funeral prayer for a boy who may or may not be his son. This aching, impossibly personal premise is augmented by the film’s visual style, whose extensive medium close-ups pay special attention to faces and reactions while avoiding direct interaction with the action unfolding in the camp. Images that would normally dominate a film about the holocaust—pleading families torn apart, naked corpses crudely piled together, unruly prisoners killed at gunpoint—are relegated to the background, blurred and otherwise obscured in order to create an impressionistic and disorienting experience.
The effect is certainly harrowing, but it also begs a larger question, one Nemes seems to have anticipated: Is it appropriate? As has been discussed for decades, there’s an intrinsic moral quandary in aestheticizing mankind’s greatest failure, and the success of a holocaust film often boils down to tact. Nemes has expressed frustration with conventional film depictions of the holocaust, and one way—perhaps the only way—to look at Son of Saul is as a direct response to sentimental offerings like Schindler’s List, a dialectical object forged in hard aesthetics. You can also look at it as an internationally successful arthouse object because it won a major prize at Cannes and is the current frontrunner for Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards; when viewed both ways, Son of Saul emerges as an inherently conflicted, brilliantly sensorial film that frustrates and fascinates in equal measure.
Unlike most art and philosophy that followed WWII, Son of Saul does not judge Saul and his fellow Sonderkommando. Nemes’ long takes and jostling camerawork place Saul in a sort of constant state of duress, where he’s barely given time to react to his surroundings, let alone contemplate the personal and spiritual implications of betraying his people to (maybe, most likely not) stay alive. The film’s frenetic style expresses a hyperactive sensation of human survival, which somewhat paradoxically transcends human emotions like guilt and remorse. The camera is framed almost exclusively on Saul as he performs his unimaginable duties, which include leading unsuspecting Jews into gas chambers and quickly disposing of their bodies after they die; the shallow focus photography ensures that we only see glimpses of this dreadfulness, and our gauge of the situation largely depends on Röhrig’s response, enough to both shape the character’s psychological strain and impart a fleeting yet resounding sense of horror on the audience. Like a good action film, Son of Saul places the viewer directly in the fray.
However, this determined approach to real-time tension, albeit cerebral and occasionally quite beautiful, means the film is deliberately obfuscated from the bigger picture—namely, the human dynamic. Son of Saul stakes its claim in stylistic authenticity, which it has in spades, but the lack of dramatic believability and overall heavy-handedness leads to diminished returns. By offering extreme formalism as an entryway into endlessly complicated ideas of moving image art and historical representation, Nemes fosters an experiential rather than an intellectual, spiritual or emotional response. The film eventually cancels itself out by simulating an overwhelmingly traumatic situation that can only be received as an aesthetic experience. Nemes’ depiction of the holocaust, however well intentioned, ultimately accounts to little more than a glib counterargument to an already glib discussion.
