Son of Saul

Son of Saul, in limited release, is another harrowing Holocaust story, but in a category apart from films like Schindler’s List, The Pianist, and Life Is Beautiful. This Hungarian film, tightly edited at under two hours, is a contender for the Oscar for best foreign language film. The original languages—Hungarian, German, and Yiddish—make it all the more realistic.

Saul (Géza Röhrig) is a Hungarian Jew working in the Sonderkommand, a group of Jews who must remove bodies from the gas chambers and scrub the floors for the next round of executions. The work delays their own executions a few months.

While removing bodies one day, Saul sees a boy he believes to be his long-lost son. He becomes obsessed with giving the boy a proper Jewish burial, negotiating for the body and scouring the camp for a rabbi. The boy may not actually be Saul’s son, and the rabbi Saul finds may not be a rabbi. This is a spiritually ambiguous film. It depicts human depravity, and the human desire for meaning—but Saul is not necessarily seeking anything specific beyond a final death rite.

As expected, this story is hard to watch. The film is rated R for intense violence, executions, and repeated nudity of the bodies coming out of the gas chambers. But many of the horrors are out of focus or merely audible because the camera follows Saul’s face in long shots for most of the movie, increasing pressure and tension. This device is creative but becomes overbearing eventually.

Still, Saul is watchable. He is fearless, sneaking into different work groups and making cunning, split-second decisions. “We are already dead,” he says at one point. So what do we have to fear, now that we’re dead?

This is not a very optimistic, American way to approach life, but it is certainly Christian. First-time director/writer László Nemes has said in interviews that he was frustrated with Holocaust movies that try to “reassure” the audience: “The Holocaust is not about survival.”