movie review son of saul

Son of Saul

“Son of Saul” begins with a long, unbroken shot of mesmerizing intricacy. The year is 1944 at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Saul Auslander ( Géza Röhrig ), a member of the camp’s Sonderkommando—prisoners forced to help the Nazis exterminate Jews, thereby delaying their own deaths for a few months—walks toward the camera from far off in the woods before finally coming into focus in the center of the frame. From there, Hungarian director and co-writer László Nemes follows Saul as he goes about his daily work herding new arrivals toward the undressing room and into the gas chamber. They’d been promised hot meals and well-paying jobs, something Saul has heard countless times before. Clearly, none of that is in store for these people.

Nemes stays close, showing us only what Saul sees, photographing him from the back or the side, Dardennes-style, as he walks purposefully toward each destination. The horror remains in the periphery, a blur, but it’s unmistakable: the pounding and screaming from behind the metal doors, the naked and lifeless limbs being dragged across the concrete floor once the doors have reopened. The suggestion of the suffering is more unsettling than wallowing in it. Saul reacts to nothing. His face remains stoic, unflinching.

Right away, we know we’re in the hands of a director who wants to tell the story of the Holocaust from a different perspective than we’ve seen before in films: a more personal, intimate one. “Son of Saul” is a movie that requires attention and patience, with a script from Nemes and Clara Royer that’s often wordless or whispered. If you’re not a fan of ambiguity, either from a narrative or moral perspective, you may have trouble here. But this is just a marvel of controlled filmmaking—a bold vision carried out with powerful simplicity, and an impressively assured debut form both Nemes and Röhrig as his star.

Röhrig has the tricky task of carrying this story on his shoulders—and us along with him—without the benefit of being able to emote or even say much. It’s a physical performance as much as it is a quietly emotional one; he has to establish who this man is mainly through his gestures, demeanor and energy. Saul is savvy and resourceful, traits he must use again and again to survive over the course of a harrowing couple of days. Then again, time is hazy here, as are many elements of “Son of Saul.” Identities are unclear at times, even of characters who play pivotal roles. Maybe that’s intentional, though—an effort by Nemes to suggest the psychological chaos that can exist in such a cruelly systematic environment.

At the film’s start, Saul is a cog in this machinery: efficient, trustworthy, unshakable. That is, until he sees the body of a boy on the verge of death, whom doctors quickly suffocate. Saul is drawn to him, and makes it his mission to find a rabbi to ensure the boy has a proper Jewish burial rather than be autopsied and incinerated. (Doctors actually refer to the body as an “it”—a thing that needs to be taken someplace.) Eventually, Saul claims the boy is his son. He may or may not be, but who he is isn’t as important as what he represents: a sense of purpose, an opportunity to break free from his soul-sucking routine and achieve a sense of redemption, however fleeting it may be.

At the same time, Saul must juggle this quest with his role in an uprising that several fellow prisoners in the camp are planning. He must choose between the spiritual fate of one boy and the practical greater good for a multitude of men and women. It’s sometimes difficult to tell who’s who in this obscured, enclosed setting; several men in the resistance look similar, and the one woman he has contact with in a brief but gripping scene never gets an explanation. But their collective urgency is palpable, and as both storylines bubble to a boil, Saul’s actions become more brazen.

Getting back to that opening tracking shot for a moment: Nemes recreates it at night toward the film’s end as the camp’s commanders carry out orders to kill an even larger number of Jews even more quickly. This time, we follow Saul as he navigates the frantic sea of humanity. Time is running out for everyone. Dogs bark. Children cry. Gunshots pierce the night sky and flames turn the whole scene into a vision of hell on Earth. But the camera stays with Saul faithfully, making us care for this person we barely know just as he cares for the son he barely had.

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series “Ebert Presents At the Movies” opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

Jerzy Walczak as Rabbi in the Sonderkommando
Marcin Czarnik as Feigenbaum
Levente Molnár as Abraham
Géza Röhrig as Saul
Urs Rechn as Biedermann
Sándor Zsótér as Doctor
Clara Royer
László Nemes
László Melis
Matthieu Taponier

Director of Photography

Mátyás Erdély

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Son of Saul is a brilliantly original vision of the Holocaust

László nemes' outstanding debut is about a different kind of survival.

By Tasha Robinson

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Son Of Saul opens with an out-of-focus shot of an empty forest glade. The camera is handheld, but it still stands passively still for nearly two minutes, until protagonist Saul (Géza Röhrig) walks from the background to the foreground, and his grey face takes over the frame in ultra-sharp detail. It takes much longer for viewers to find their bearings in the chaos that immediately follows. But as the setting becomes clear in director László Nemes' shockingly brilliant debut, the ambition, intelligence, and emotional heft of that strange opening shot does too. For the most part, as the film progresses, only Saul and the things that become important to him are meaningfully in focus. As a trustee in Auschwitz, assisting with the systematic execution of thousands of other Jews like himself, he's had to narrow his world down to his immediate surroundings. Everything outside his own survival becomes a blur, and the camera reflects and respects that.

Nemes' film is confident and manifestly singular

Saul is one of the Sonderkommando, the concentration camp prisoners who temporarily escaped execution by assisting their captors. He helps herd new prisoners into the gas chambers, then searches their discarded clothes for valuables afterward, and obediently helps clean up the mess. Nemes follows this process in long, unbroken, elegantly choreographed shots that take in all the disorderly horror of a new batch of prisoners being herded into the camp, stripped in changing rooms, and slaughtered en masse. As Saul scrubs the gas chamber floor afterward, with naked corpses heaped like garden waste in his periphery, he never changes expression. He's deadened, certainly, but not immune to the horror of what he's doing, or insensitive about the suffering around him. He's just learned to tamp down on any emotional reaction in order to keep himself going from day to day.

And then, miraculously, a child briefly survives the gas chamber. A Nazi doctor calmly suffocates the boy, but the damage is done: Saul has connected with something outside himself, and his defenses have begun to crack. Convinced that the boy was his son (which the film wisely never confirms nor disproves) Saul becomes obsessed with giving the child a proper Jewish burial rather than letting him go into a mass grave or the crematorium. And so the film unfolds, as Saul pursues the one goal that's still meaningful to him.

Holocaust films tend to have a familiar visual and emotional language, and a similar progression of events. The content varies, and the tone with it — there's a world of difference between the raw personal aftermath of Phoenix and the gooey sentimental schmaltz of The Book Thief — but the ideas of tasteful restraint and deep, somber melancholy tend to prevail over everything else. There's often a sense that any personal story in a Holocaust film is standing in for a thousand like it, lost in the genocide. But there's no sense of repetition or representation here — Nemes' film is confident and manifestly singular, both in the story it tells and the visual language he uses to tell it. (It's also Hungary's submission for this year's Best Foreign Language Oscar.)

A lot of this is done through pacing. The Allies are approaching, the Nazis are desperately scaling up their operations, and the entire camp moves at Mach schnell speed. The men in Nemes' Auschwitz are constantly being yanked and shoved from one job to another. There's no dignity, no respite, and no somber contemplation to this film. It's a nervy race, with everyone pursuing their own hustles, and a sense that the system is disintegrating rapidly, though not rapidly enough.

There's also the anxious feeling that dozens of other plotlines are being pursued just offscreen. All around Saul are plans of rebellion and escape. There's a plot afoot to steal a camera and document what the Nazis are doing, before they can destroy the evidence of their war crimes. A few guards are extorting stolen wealth from the Sonderkommando, knowing there's a brisk trade in purloined valuables. All the frantic activity and crisscrossing agendas have the curious effect of intensifying Saul's quest. The conflicting plotlines complicate each other, requiring Saul to be ruthless about getting what he wants — while at the same time clarifying how truly small and personal, and therefore vivid and valuable, his obsession is in the grand scheme of things.

Much of the film's intensity comes from Röhrig's stolid performance. It's hard to evoke sympathy while playing a man on complete emotional lockdown, but Röhrig builds an implacable momentum by slowly scaling up Saul's determination and his ferocity as he gets closer to his small goal. Röhrig, a poet and Judaic Studies teacher with limited previous acting experience, gives a riveting performance. He's all contained desperation and uncompromising drive. Saul's stubbornness and obsession turn him into a bully, but Röhrig plays him like a grim action hero, stuck in an impossible situation and a diminutive, broken-down body. His refusal to compromise in the face of impossible odds becomes compelling, even as his agenda seems more and more ludicrous.

Son of Saul captures what a nightmare really feels like

Son Of Saul 's real innovation, though, comes in its compellingly myopic design. Films about oppressive situations are often called nightmarish. But Nemes, his co-writer Clara Royer, and his cinematographer, Mátyás Erdély, capture what a nightmare really feels like: the subjective sense of dread, the constantly altering landscape, the fluidity of a situation built more around terror than around any fixed reality. The clatter and shrieks of the camp stand in for a score, making the entire story feel rough, muscular, and unpolished. Saul's focus on the child's corpse specifically makes the film into one of those anxiety nightmares about losing something, in which the dreamer keeps getting pushed further from it. It's dizzying and tremendously sad, but simultaneously exhilarating due to Nemes' complete control of his environment, and complete merging of his narrative and compositional elements. It isn't just a unique story, it's a unique execution.

It may be hard for audiences to identify with Saul, for all the humanity Röhrig gives him, and for all the suffering he endures. The same nervy rush and tight focus that make Son Of Saul feel unlike any other Holocaust movie also make it a claustrophobic viewing experience, especially as Saul's actions start causing other people to suffer. But if most Holocaust films are about survival, Son of Saul is a stunning portrait of a specific kind of survival: the kind where, in extremis, people radically reduce what success looks like. For the Sonderkommando, life required unutterable compromise. Son Of Saul grimly examines the effects and limits of that compromise, while never compromising itself.

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Son of Saul Is a Harrowing First-Person Look at the Holocaust — With a Big Cheat of an Ending

Be advised that this review addresses the entire narrative of Son of Saul, including revelations as well as the ending of the film.

Set amid the Zyklon-B-dispensing showers and corpse-disposal facilities of the most infamous Nazi extermination camp, Auschwitz, Son of Saul is difficult for most people — especially Jews — to sit through, much less write about, much less criticize. I admit that I watched in a defensive crouch, afraid of what I might see next and torn between admiration for the courage of its 38-year-old Hungarian director, László Nemes, and doubts about the device he invented for going where no fictional filmmaker has gone before: to put the audience in the head of a camp resident on a quixotic — to say the least — mission to find spiritual closure.

That resident is Saul Ausländer (Géza Röhrig), one of a group of Jews (“Sonder-kommandos”) allowed to live (for a time) by performing the most grisly of tasks: transporting the bodies of men, women, and children from the showers to the crematorium and/or cleaning up the mess left behind. Nemes and his cinematographer, Mátyás Erdély, photograph Son of Saul almost entirely from Saul’s fevered vantage, which is, in one respect, a mercy. The faces of the corpses — with a sole exception — are offscreen. Instead, we see parts of bodies, blue-gray limbs and torsos, often blurred along with the backgrounds. The blurring has a dramatic function: to suggest that to do his job, Saul has had to screen out his fellow Jews’ identities, even their humanity.

That exception is a teenage boy who somehow survives a gassing. Carried from the showers, he is avidly scrutinized by Nazi doctors and then, in a long, hazy shot, suffocated. I tried to comfort myself with the thought that he was unconscious and would not have lived long anyway — some comfort. Saul’s response is more convoluted. The boy, he tells a fellow worker, is his son, and he must bury the body in a formal Jewish ritual, with a rabbi present to say the traditional prayer for the dead. It’s a perilous quest because (a) the boy’s body is marked for dissection and (b) men identified as rabbis are promptly murdered by the Nazis.

There’s no way to engage with Son of Saul without spelling out its central conceit, which means you should read no further if you want to be “surprised.” (I’ll be discussing the ending, too, so beware.) As the film goes on, it’s more and more apparent that the boy is not Saul’s son. By all accounts (including that of a woman he encounters who might be his wife), Saul has no son. We are trailing a madman. But he has, of course, a larger kind of sanity. Unable to deaden himself any longer to the horror around him, Saul has unconsciously devised a way to reconnect with the world he once knew, with its age-old system of values and abiding faith. For the remainder of the film, the camera follows Saul from one part of the camp to another as he searches for a rabbi to say the Mourner’s Kaddish.

Nemes spent a decade bringing Son of Saul to the screen (this is his first feature), and it has a distinctively thick texture — heavy, as if the air itself had turned viscid, clotted with bodies living and dead, rank. The sound is dense, layer upon layer of clanks and infernal hisses and the muffled screams of the dying. Working from, among other primary texts, diaries buried by Sonderkommandos before a 1944 revolt, Nemes has diagrammed the machine, showing us How Things Worked in a factory created to make murder impersonal and efficient, to streamline genocide. And Nemes has streamlined the movie to make you feel that mechanization viscerally, shooting most scenes in long, single, unrelieved takes. Amid such all-enveloping inhumanity, acts of cruelty come to seem routine, acts of cowardice on the part of other Jews grimly expected, and acts of kindness momentous.

The texture is thick — but the film is thin. There’s only one full-fleshed character in Son of Saul, and he has only one idea, an idée fixe. It’s a one-idea movie. We’re not just trapped in an extermination camp. We’re also trapped in the head of a fiercely driven but unaware and unreflective figure, uninteresting not because he’s mad but because his madness is, like the film itself, monotonous. Like Birdman and other “tour de force” endurance tests, Son of Saul holds us with its hard-charging technique, its bullying subjectivity.

The movie doesn’t expand in your mind — it shrinks along with its protagonist, its conclusion a reductio ad absurdum. Saul gets swept up in an escape attempt that takes him across a river, where he loses that precious body in the current, and into a forest cabin where his fellow fugitives plan their next moves. Suddenly, a small Polish boy wanders by, sees them, and runs away — but what Saul perceives is that his son is alive after all. He dies radiant, that madness turning out to be the tenderest mercy of all.

This is, bluntly, crap, and if the finale weren’t so shocking — everyone dies off-screen in a barrage of Nazi gunfire — I think the audience would see it more clearly for the cheap trick it is. In interviews, Nemes has argued that most Holocaust stories lie by focusing on survival instead of the reality — that the Jews of Europe were almost completely exterminated. His ending is a way of delivering that message but with a cute literary button, which can be taken as either a sick joke at the expense of the character in whose mission we’ve been invested or a “Little Match Girl” moment of deliverance. Or both. However you take it, the final minute suggests that Nemes has been boxed into a corner by his own high concept.

I don’t want to diminish Nemes’s accomplishment in re-creating this hell and setting us down in the middle of it — a place that many of us have never even allowed ourselves to imagine being. But we measure works that center on human atrocities by different standards, and deluded Saul ends up a poor vessel for a journey of this magnitude. A true tragic hero dies with his eyes wide open.

*This article appears in the January 11, 2016 issue of New York Magazine .

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Review: ‘Son of Saul’ Revisits Life and Death in Auschwitz

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By A.O. Scott

Dec. 17, 2015

The shape of the screen is unusually narrow in “Son of Saul,” the 38-year-old Hungarian filmmaker Laszlo Nemes’s debut feature. Nearly square, it evokes an earlier era, when all movies looked this way, and also emphasizes the claustrophobia of the story and the setting. We are in a Nazi death camp, and really in it, to a degree that few fictional films have had the nerve to attempt. The camera doesn’t just survey the barracks and the guard towers, the haggard prisoners and brutal guards. It takes us to the very door of the gas chambers, in the close company of Saul Auslander ( Geza Rohrig ), a Jewish inmate who is a member of the camp’s Sonderkommando (special commando) unit.

Here I should step back a bit, though Mr. Nemes, who favors a hand-held, intimate, in-the-moment shooting style, decidedly does not. The Sonderkommando occupy an especially painful and contested place in the history of the Holocaust. Slave laborers like nearly everyone else in the camps who was not immediately killed, they had the job of shepherding their fellow Jews to their deaths and cleaning up afterward, sorting through clothes, eyeglasses, jewelry and other personal effects and burning the corpses.

They were rewarded for this service with meager privileges that included improved rations and the postponement of their own inevitable deaths. In Auschwitz-Birkenau, where “ Son of Saul ” takes place, there was a Sonderkommando uprising in 1944, an event that is echoed in parts of the film. After the war, members of the Sonderkommando were shunned by many other survivors because they had, however involuntarily, participated in the slaughter. Some were executed or otherwise punished for collaborating with the Germans.

Anatomy of a Scene | ‘Son of Saul’

Laszlo nemes narrates a sequence from “son of saul.”.

This larger history is kept outside the frame. Shot mostly in extended close-ups (the skilled director of photography is Matyas Erdely), “Son of Saul” moves rapidly and relentlessly in the present tense, never leaving Saul’s side. Not that we penetrate his thoughts. Mr. Rohrig, a poet and former teacher appearing in his first film, has the intriguing opacity that distinguishes nonprofessional actors. Like Lamberto Maggiorani in “Bicycle Thieves” or Maria Falconetti in “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” he is an indelibly particular, almost spiritually intense, screen presence. His face is hard to read and impossible to forget — a mask of stoicism, anguish, exhaustion and cunning.

Our eyes are trained on Saul, and therefore we don’t see much of what he sees. Mr. Nemes uses shallow focus techniques that blur everything not immediately in front of his protagonist’s face. Though we find ourselves in close proximity to death, we are also detached from it. Human figures are blurred, movements are indistinct, and horrifying sounds — cries, gasps, footsteps, blows — reach us from invisible sources.

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Entertainment
Review: Holocaust Drama <i>Son of Saul</i> Is Rigorous, Demanding and Rewarding

Review: Holocaust Drama Son of Saul Is Rigorous, Demanding and Rewarding

I n a movie, sometimes one face is everything. In Son of Saul, set in Auschwitz in 1944, Hungarian-born actor Géza Röhrig plays the Saul of the title, a member of the Sonderkommando, special groups of death-camp prisoners forced to dispose of the bodies of their own people—only, before long, to face extermination themselves. Saul is on duty when a boy, near miraculously, survives the gas chamber—the young man is quickly put to death by a camp doctor, and an autopsy is ordered, to determine what made him so tenacious.

Saul witnesses all of this—in fact, we’re with Saul every moment, so we’re at least brushed with an awareness of his surroundings—and becomes consumed with saving the boy from the knife and finding a rabbi to recite the Kaddish. In the context of the surrounding horrors, it’s a fool’s errand. But everything in Saul’s face—a haunted woodcut, painfully alive to everything around him—tells us that this small but highly risky gesture is imperative. It’s the last thing that can keep him human.

There’s no way to describe Son of Saul, winner of the Grand Prix in Cannes last year, without making it sound like one of those movies you know you ought to see but will find any excuse to avoid. But if it’s a demanding film, in the end it isn’t a despairing one. Son of Saul doesn’t give the audience anything so falsely comforting as a happy ending—how could it? But it treats suffering as a living, breathing entity, not just as a dramatist’s tool or a means of punishing an audience. Its director and co-writer, Hungarian filmmaker László Nemes (making his feature-film debut), isn’t just re-creating unspeakable sadness but electrifying it with a kind of somber energy. For all its intensity, Son of Saul is never ponderous. It moves so quickly, and relies so little on dialogue, that you need to race a little to keep up with it, and to keep your eyes open every second.

Still, you should brace yourself for the experience of watching it. Nemes keeps the camera moving almost constantly, focusing mostly on Saul’s face, though also quite often on his back—he wears a gray coat with an X marked on it, and there’s no way to avoid fixating on it. We follow along, seeing what he sees. Disturbingly blurry images often lurk just on the periphery: Human corpses still pink with life are dragged as if they were animal carcasses (camp officials refer to them as “pieces”), and the movie’s sound design is distressingly effective—the victims’ screams may be muted, but there’s no blocking them out.

That’s all the more reason to stick close to Saul, which is clearly the movie’s design. He’s our guide on this tour of Hell, but he’s a deeply humane one. It’s almost as if he’s trying to protect us, too. And though his mission is noble, there’s never any certainty that he’s doing the right thing. Even as he’s trying to preserve the boy’s soul, his fellow prisoners, knowing their own execution is imminent, plan an escape. His obsessive pursuit threatens the whole undertaking. At one point a colleague admonishes Saul, “You failed the living for the dead,” and he’s not wrong. Ambiguity swirls through the picture like flickering sparks around a fire. Saul is making the only possible choice, yet it may not be the right one. In the midst of the unspeakable, what does the “right” choice even mean?

Röhrig carries the weight of that uncertainty in his bony, rolling shoulders, and in the depths of his eyes. With only a few TV credits to his name, Röhrig isn’t an experienced actor. In fact, he’s a poet and a former kindergarten teacher, living in the Bronx. But that could be what makes the performance so magnetic. You never get the sense that Röhrig trying too hard—he has simply melted into the skin of the character, and his eyes, instead of being glazed and dead, throw off a bruised, guarded radiance. A title card at the beginning of Son of Saul tells us that members of the Sonderkommando were also referred to as “bearers of secrets.” Saul is bearing so many. Perhaps it lightens his load to share some with us.

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Son of saul.

Common Sense Says
Parents Say 4 Reviews
Kids Say 2 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Powerful WWII concentration camp film is horrific, violent.

Parents Need to Know

Why Age 18+?

Nazi atrocities throughout. Most catastrophic events are portrayed with sound an

Extensive nudity without sexuality. Masses of naked inmates are herded to their

Swearing and humiliating ethnic insults: "hell," "damn," &qu

Occasional smoking in background.

Any Positive Content?

Hero finds a spark of humanity in himself while in the presence of pervasive evi

Reveals that even in the most wretched circumstances, people are capable of cour

Violence & Scariness

Nazi atrocities throughout. Most catastrophic events are portrayed with sound and in the background of the shots rather than in direct focus. Large groups of Jewish prisoners are forced to strip and enter gas chambers; their agonized voices and pounding attempts at escape are palpable. Guards shoot inmates at random. In one horrific sequence, naked prisoners are chased into enormous pits, attacked by flame throwers and rifles; the sound of terror and pain accompanies the smoke-filled images. At all times, the concentration-camp prisoners are in fear for their lives and suffer humiliation and injury at the hands of their oppressors.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Extensive nudity without sexuality. Masses of naked inmates are herded to their deaths. Dead bodies (seen full frontal) are dragged across the ground in multiple scenes.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Swearing and humiliating ethnic insults: "hell," "damn," "s--t," "bastard," "son of a bitch," "swine," "scum," "Jewish rat," "stupid."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Role Models

Hero finds a spark of humanity in himself while in the presence of pervasive evil; he then calls upon hidden reserves of courage, resourcefulness, and love. Facing death, comrades in Auschwitz come together as a loyal team and exhibit bravery and a sliver of hope. Villainous Nazis are relentlessly inhumane.

Positive Messages

Reveals that even in the most wretched circumstances, people are capable of courage, righteousness, and commitment. Places great value on fighting for dignity and liberty against enormous odds. Shows how individuals willingly relinquish their humanity in a group setting; as a part of a mob or army, they are capable of barbarous acts of cruelty. Perseverance and teamwork are additional themes.

Parents need to know that Son of Saul is a Hungarian film with English subtitles that takes place in Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp. While the brutal story is told almost entirely through the eyes of one Jewish inmate, the magnitude of the crimes against all those imprisoned there is made very real. Most of the violence takes place either off camera or in the background of the film's frames, but the full impact of the atrocities comes from the sounds of terror and chaos that accompany the visual images. Inmates are brutally manhandled, forced to strip, shot, gassed, and burned to death. Fear is omnipresent. Nudity (including full-frontal nakedness) is shown as people are rounded up on their way to their deaths and as their dead bodies are retrieved. This movie succeeds in projecting some of the harshest realities of genocide; it's at the very least a cautionary tale. What's more, because of the talent of both filmmakers and the lead actor, it feels like a most accurate depiction of what may have happened during two days in October 1944. Winner of an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film in 2015, as well as more than 50 other prestigious awards, it's a movie that demands to be seen -- but not by kids. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Parent and Kid Reviews

Parents say (4)
Kids say (2)

Based on 4 parent reviews

How far will we go to grieve with our full humanity?

Hungarian auschwitz film shows inmates' horrors as well as resilience, what's the story.

Saul Auslander (Geza Rohrig) is a Sonderkommando in the Auschwitz death camp in October 1944 in SON OF SAUL. Sonderkommandos, Jewish prisoners forced to perform grisly and mind-numbing tasks, knew that they, too, would be executed in short order. Saul's duties are to assist in removing bodies from the gas chambers, search for valuables among the victims' clothes and possessions, and clean up the anteroom before the next terrified Jews arrive for mass slaughter. His mind and spirit already broken, Saul finds a still-breathing boy among the fallen. Though the child dies soon afterward, Saul decides that he must, above all else, provide this one innocent with a traditional Jewish blessing and burial. Driven by renewed energy and purpose, Saul risks his life over and over again to find a rabbi and lay the boy whom he proclaims his "son" to rest. At the same time, some of Saul's closest inmate brethren are planning an escape. Saul's obsession compromises their efforts. The two events collide amid heartbreaking chaos, danger, and merciless acts of cruelty.

Is It Any Good?

The full devastation of genocide, incomparable acts of cruelty, and humanity's ability to adapt to horror play out in the face of one man in this stunning, remarkable film. Other films have captured the Holocaust's atrocities and magnitude of heartlessness, but Son of Saul brings the more private moments of ravaged minds and souls to bear. The brilliance of Lazlo Nemes and his team comes from keeping Saul -- his face, his body, his point of view -- at the center of all (Rohrig's performance is shockingly real). While around him naked bodies are being dragged from the gas chamber to the ovens, while on the fringes of the frame his fellow prisoners go through the countless shoes, clothes, and personal effects of the victims, Nemes' camera is on Saul. And Saul is a study in the art of living while already dead. Some of the most savage acts happen mostly off camera or on the fringes of the shots, including the lengthy sequence of mass killing that takes place at the "pits" when the gas chambers are too crowded, which may be one of the most disturbing events in all cinema. This multiple award-winning film is hard to watch, and even harder to forget. Not for kids.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how director Lazla Nemes portrayed the horrors of Auschwitz while showing little direct violence in Son of Saul . How did he and his team use techniques such as sound effects, soft focus, and close-up reactions of Saul to recreate what would have been unfilmable and too graphic for audiences? Do you think the movie succeeded in evoking the grim reality of the camp?

Whether or not the dead boy was Saul's son was a question the movie raised. Did the identity of the boy matter? Why, or why not? What did he symbolize for Saul?

Think about both the relative absence of dialogue and color in this film. What did the filmmakers use instead of words to convey story and emotion? How did the colors used contribute to the overall character of the movie?

How do the characters in Son of Saul demonstrate courage , perseverance , and teamwork ? Why are these important character strength ?

Movie Details

In theaters : December 18, 2015
On DVD or streaming : April 26, 2016
Cast : Geza Rohrig , Levente Molnar , Urs Rechn
Director : Lazlo Nemes
Studio : Sony Pictures Classics
Genre : Drama
Topics : History
Character Strengths : Courage , Perseverance , Teamwork
Run time : 107 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : Disturbing violent content and some graphic nudity
Awards : Academy Award , Golden Globe - Golden Globe Award Winner
Last updated : June 20, 2024

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Son of Saul Reviews

Son of Saul is one of the richest and most personal of all Holocaust films, backed by a stunning central performance and realized by a filmmaker who has an incredibly bright future ahead of him.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Jun 17, 2024

Grappling with themes of self-preservation and mental stability amongst abject barbarity, Son of Saul packs an emotional punch all its own, while seeking to convey the essence of an individual living in abhorrent chaos.

Full Review | Aug 1, 2023

A difficult, harrowing, and exhausting film to endure – claustrophobic and psychological. But it’s also an intimate and gripping experience and an extraordinary feature film debut from László Nemes.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 25, 2022

If the intention is to give us even a fleeting experience of what it could have been like to live in constant fear, hoping for a breath of humanity in a life shaped by evil, then it has achieved that entirely.

Full Review | May 5, 2021

I understand Godard's criticism of Schindler's List now. No holocaust movie should be a thriller. Hungarian first timer Laszlo Nemes's Auschwitz set drama is at once riveting and quietly devastating experience and it doesn't feel like a gimmick.

Full Review | Feb 14, 2021

Son of Saul presents a gargantuan moral victory in the face of incomprehensible evil.

Full Review | Jan 7, 2021

Its jagged stylistic urgency [makes] it unlike any prior Holocaust drama

Full Review | Oct 28, 2020

Nemes also achieves a cinema separated from sentimentality that offers a sober, unavoidable and gloomy glimpse of dehumanization in times of war. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Jun 26, 2020

László Nemes believes in the viewer's capabilities and gives him an intelligent, hard and real film. [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | May 14, 2020

Son of Saul is a film of considerable virtuosity, a harrowing film like no other before it.

Full Review | Mar 16, 2020

Absolutely worth your time.

Full Review | Oct 17, 2019

This film will certainly stick with you. That's for sure.

Full Review | Original Score: 10/10 | Sep 19, 2019

It's a deeply harrowing experience.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 26, 2019

The horror around him remains blurred; we only hear it. It's still hard to watch. But as the story of one man's relentless quest for a glimmer of nobility, Son of Saul earns its right to be unforgettable.

Full Review | Aug 8, 2019

Son of Saul is a powerful reminder that things can get bad awfully quick if we're not paying attention.

Full Review | Aug 2, 2019

Technically astounding and emotionally resonant, only the feeling that we never fully understand Saul or his motivations (despite spending the entire film with him) lets Son of Saul down.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 19, 2019

Beyond hope and fear, it's a story where there are no miracles, no resolution and no-one survives. It's unforgettable.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 22, 2019

It's not literally filmed in a single take or real-time, but Nemes' storytelling mastery approximates that sensibility as we follow Saul through his haunting sensory journey.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 4, 2018

It's expectedly an awful time at the movies, but also an important and problematic work that can't be dismissed.

Full Review | Nov 3, 2018

I'm not sure there are many of you strong enough to even read about it without getting teary.

Full Review | Aug 29, 2018

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Film Review: ‘Son of Saul’

Hungarian helmer Laszlo Nemes and actor Geza Rohrig make a powerful debut with this grim, unyielding Holocaust drama.

By Justin Chang

Justin Chang

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Possessed by the same single-minded intensity that drives its protagonist’s every step, “ Son of Saul ” plunges the viewer into a hell that exists beyond the limits of comprehension or representation. A terrifyingly accomplished first feature for 38-year-old Hungarian writer-director Laszlo Nemes , this indelible portrait of Auschwitz in the latter days of WWII sticks to the limited vantage of a Jewish prisoner who, immune to either hope or fear, becomes bent on carrying out a single, desperate act of moral survival. The result is as grim and unyielding a depiction of the Holocaust as has yet been made on that cinematically overworked subject — a masterful exercise in narrative deprivation and sensory overload that recasts familiar horrors in daringly existential terms. Further festival bookings, post-screening arguments and a narrow commercial life are assured for this rare debut film to secure a competition berth at Cannes.

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Boldly courting the kind of debate about how (or whether) the Nazi death camps should be depicted that dates back at least as far as Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah” (1985), “Son of Saul” is likely to draw admiration and outrage alike: Does its uncompromising restraint and formal rigor serve as a corrective to the sensationalism and sentimentality favored by Hollywood, or does it merely substitute one form of exploitation for another? To the credit of Nemes (who co-scripted with Clara Royer), his immersive yet powerfully withholding film is clearly built for, and comfortable with, a measure of moral ambiguity. Not for nothing does the story center around a fictional member of the Sonderkommandos, those Jewish workers who were forced to assist in the mass murder and disposal of their own, delaying their own executions by mere months.

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The wretched fate of these custodians of death — their uniquely up-close perspective on the workings of the Final Solution and the unspeakable guilt they suffered for their participation — was addressed earlier in not only “Shoah” but also Tim Blake Nelson’s “The Grey Zone” (2001), which starred David Arquette as an American-accented Jewish captive in an ensemble drama too archly stylized for its own good. Nemes’ film, by contrast, distinguishes itself in both its verisimilitude and its unrelenting focus on one individual, Saul Auslander (Geza Rohrig, making his own exceptional screen debut), a Hungarian Jewish man who works with a Sonderkommando unit at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

It’s typical of the ruthlessness of the film’s approach that we first encounter Saul on the job, as he and his fellow workers come alongside a group of new arrivals and steer them into the “undressing room.” The discretion and matter-of-factness of the horror only makes it that much more unsettling: We hear screams briefly issuing forth from the gas chambers, but the camera doesn’t venture inside until afterward, when Saul and the others are dutifully removing the bodies and scrubbing down the walls and floors in preparation for the next group. Business as usual.

One of the film’s scrupulously observed ground rules, then, is that we will see only what Saul sees, and Nemes and his gifted cinematographer Matyas Erdely fully commit to this persistence-of-vision tactic by filming in long, unbroken handheld shots that can last for minutes (the film’s clearest debt to the ascetic style of Hungarian master Bela Tarr, for whom Nemes served as an assistant director on 2007’s “The Man From London”). Their decision to shoot on 35mm film stock lends the images an immense tactility and subtle richness of color, even within the squalid, shadowy camp interiors (as expertly re-created by production designer Laszlo Rajk). Meanwhile, the shallow-focus compositions and the use of the Academy aspect ratio have the effect of placing Saul’s head at the center of the almost square frame, while the action behind him — including, pointedly, most of the violence and nudity that another film might have foregrounded — remains an out-of-focus blur. It’s a perfect visual representation of a mental state that has long since absorbed the unthinkable.

The experience of watching “Son of Saul,” then, is not unlike that of navigating the inner circles of Dante’s Inferno with the Dardenne brothers (at least during the extreme-ear-cam phase that produced 2003’s “The Son”). Notably, however, Saul is no aimless wanderer but rather a man on a mission, spurred into action when he finds that a young boy has somehow survived the gas. The child is quickly put to death, but Saul, for reasons hinted at by the title but not explained until later, can neither look away from his face nor allow him to be cut open by a doctor (Sandor Zsoter), as official regulations dictate. From that point onward, Saul will have only one goal: not to survive or escape, but to find a rabbi who can give the boy a proper Jewish burial. It’s an unthinkably dangerous, foolhardy objective, especially on the eve of a long-planned prisoner uprising (situating the film’s action right around Oct. 7, 1944), and it will require Saul to defy captors and collaborators alike, resorting to all manner of manipulation, blackmail, fast thinking and quick, decisive action.

One of the key achievements of “Son of Saul” is that without deviating from Saul’s perspective, it succeeds in mapping out an intricate network of relationships among the Sonderkommandos, the Oberkapos (their superior officers) and the SS guards (two of whom are played by Uwe Lauer and Christian Harting). In a series of tense exchanges and negotiations, an entire world of moral compromise reveals itself: You hear the shame and self-loathing in the Sonderkommando members’ voices, but you also sense that they’ve used their positions to gain leverage with the enemy. Remarkably, Saul seems to act with utter fearlessness, and he’s particularly good at capitalizing on the chaos around him, especially when the Nazis, aware of encroaching Russian soldiers, speed up their killing frenzy and lose all semblance of control. As one Jew notes in a rare on-the-nose line of dialogue, “We’re already dead,” and for Saul, at least, the truth of that statement becomes its own curious form of liberation.

A measure of confusion over what’s going on and who’s who — like Saul’s fellow workers (some of whom are played by Levente Molnar, Marcin Czarnik and Kamil Dobrowlsky), or a young woman (Juli Jakab) who’s helping them with the uprising — is an entirely fitting response. True to his unstintingly realistic approach, Nemes is in no hurry to dispel our disorientation, explain the plot, or clarify the clash of Hungarian, German and Yiddish languages at various points. Yet he excels at drawing the viewer into a state of heightened attentiveness that matches his protagonist’s own. To identify with Saul would be presumptuous and beside the point, but by film’s end there’s no denying the sense of shared intimacy with this most bleakly engaging of companions.

The prolonged assault of the filmmaking won’t be to all tastes — particularly the sound work by Tamas Zanyi, who almost seems to be overcompensating for the picture’s visual restrictions with its cacophonous layering of screams, shouts, frenzied whispers, gunshots and unplaceable background noise. But few will argue with the sustained grip and power of the film’s central performance: Rohrig, an amazing find, requires no grand speeches or overtly introspective moments to hold our attention for nearly every second of the 107-minute running time. His eyes seem to radiate a determination and moral clarity that extends beyond the here and now, his actions suggesting a desperate will to believe in a God who could scarcely seem more absent. For Saul, and for Nemes’ galvanizing film, the acceptance of death is no excuse for the rejection of meaning.

Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (competing), May 14, 2015. Running time: 107 MIN. (Original title: “Saul fia”)

Production: (Hungary) A Mozinet (in Hungary)/Ad Vitam (in France) release of a Laokoon Filmgroup presentation, with the support of the Hungarian National Film Fund and the Claims Conference. (International sales: Films Distribution, Paris.) Produced by Gabor Sipos, Gabor Rajna. Executive producer, Judit Stalter.
Crew: Directed by Laszlo Nemes. Screenplay, Clara Royer, Nemes. Camera (Kodak color, 35mm), Matyas Erdely; editor, Matthieu Taponier; music, Laszlo Melis; production designer, Laszlo Rajk; sound (Dolby Digital), Tamas Zanyi; line producer, Krisztina Pinter; casting, Eva Zabezsinszkij.
With: Geza Rohrig, Levente Molnar, Urs Rechn, Todd Charmont, Sandor Zsoter, Marcin Czarnik, Jerzy Walczak, Uwe Lauer, Christian Harting, Kamil Dobrowlski, Amitai Kedar, Istvan Pion, Juli Jakab, Levente Orban, Attila Fritz. (German, Hungarian, Yiddish dialogue)

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Review: Set in Nazi death camps, ‘Son of Saul’ is a powerful, immersive vision of hell

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“Son of Saul” is an immersive experience of the most disturbing kind, an unwavering vision of a particular kind of hell. No matter how many Holocaust films you’ve seen, you’ve not seen one like this.

A confident, audacious first feature by Hungarian director László Nemes and winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes, “Son of Saul” is carefully focused on a 36-hour period inside Auschwitz-Birkenau in October 1944.

It’s not just the film’s complete avoidance of special pleading and sentimentality, nor the concentration camp setting that makes “Son of Saul” simultaneously difficult to watch and impossible to turn away from.

It’s the powerful and impressive way director Nemes, his virtuoso cinematographer, Mátyás Erdély, and the rest of the team combine aesthetic choices and cinematic techniques to give viewers a terrifying fictional glimpse of what it might have been like to be inside what Nemes has called “a factory producing and eliminating corpses on an industrial scale.”

This glimpse is so potent and unprecedented that it overshadows the story of one man’s quest that Nemes and his co-screenwriter, Clara Royer, have chosen to tell. To a certain extent that narrative functions as a device that enables us to see more of the charnel house chaos of Auschwitz-Birkenau (where part of Nemes’ family was killed) than we would otherwise encounter, a skeleton key, in effect, to different circles of hell.

“Son of Saul” begins with text on screen defining the term Sonderkommandos , a particular group of prisoners used by the Germans to do the grunt work of extermination — soul-numbing tasks like removing and burning bodies from gas chambers and scrubbing the floors clean for the next group.

Also known as “bearers of secrets,” the Sonderkommandos’ specific knowledge mandated that they be housed separately from the rest of the camp and meant they worked only a few months before being executed themselves. (A compilation of writings left behind by Sonderkommandos was the film’s inspiration.)

“Son of Saul” begins deliberately, with an out-of-focus shot. We see the outline of a man walking forward and into focus, and once the camera finds him, it shadows him like a second skin for the entire film, moving when he moves, stopping when he stops, looking where he looks, seeing only what he sees.

That takes exceptional preparation by cinematographer Erdély and intricate choreography with all the actors. Making things more complicated, Nemes favors long takes (he worked as an assistant to the similarly inclined fellow Hungarian Bela Tarr), so much so that this 1 hour, 47 minute film reportedly contains only 85 shots.

The man in question, Saul Auslander (the name translates as outsider or foreigner), a Hungarian who speaks a smattering of Yiddish and wears, as do the other Sonderkommandos , a jacket with an enormous red X on the back. He’s effectively played by Géza Röhrig, a poet and sometime actor whose face here is sullen, impassive, to all intents and purposes dead to the world.

Saul works at one of Auschwitz’s crematoriums (nightmarishly designed by production designer László Rajk in a warehouse outside Budapest and shot and intended to be theatrically projected in 35 mm for added visual texture). He is part of a team that herds terrified Jews to undressing rooms, where they are told they will be assigned jobs after they take “showers.”

As each group is being gassed, Saul and his compatriots quickly dispose of their clothing (after searching it for valuables) and then deal with the corpses and the mess, all at double time.

Saul is consistently shot in shallow focus, which means that the dead bodies, the beatings, all the classic horrors of the camps, are visible only in the corners of the frame or half-glimpsed in the background. This normalization of nightmare both presents the world as Saul saw it and increases our shock that this kind of savage dehumanization could be experienced in such a business as usual way.

Essential in creating the nightmare ambience of the camp is “Son of Saul’s” complex, layered soundtrack, which takes the place of a conventional score and assaults us with a constant barrage of screams and moans, the sounds of beatings and the off-screen desperation of people fighting not to die. Nemes told his superb sound designer Tamás Zányi that sound would create 50% of the movie, and he was not exaggerating.

The story co-writers Nemes and Royer place in this maelstrom is really quite a simple one. A boy unexpectedly survives, for a few minutes, the gas chamber, and when Saul sees him, he is seized by the idea that this boy is his son.

While the film is intentionally vague about whether the boy actually is Saul’s son, there is no doubt about the nature of the man’s ever more manic determination to find a rabbi to say kaddish, the prayer for the dead, for the boy, and then give him a proper burial.

Monomania can became tedious, even in a situation like this, but Saul’s zeal takes him out of his usual routines and allows the film to take us on a kind of devil’s walkabout and reveal other aspects of the camps. We see crematorium ashes being shoveled into a river, people being shot and shoved into pits en masse by the hellish light of flamethrowers, even the taking of clandestine photographs and the beginnings of a Sonderkommando rebellion (things that actually happened at Auschwitz).

Stunning as all this is, “Son of Saul” by definition lacks the ultimate horror provided by actual footage as seen in almost unbearable documentaries such as the recent “Night Will Fall.” But that shouldn’t take anything away from the accomplishment — and the necessity — of this film.

Careful to respect survivor Primo Levi’s famous dictum about Auschwitz — “Here there is no why” — “Son of Saul” makes no attempt to explain events that in many ways remain beyond human comprehension.

But the film believes, accurately, that there is value in renewed attempts to depict what happened, that treating the Holocaust as something it would be sacrilegious to attempt to represent serves no purpose. It’s essential for us as a culture to continually see and understand that this was not an aberration, that people did this to other people and could do it again. Having films like “Son of Saul” made and seen is our best hope of that not happening.

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------------

‘Son of Saul’

MPAA rating: R, for disturbing violent content, and some graphic nudity

Running time: 1 hour, 47 minutes

Playing: Nuart, West Los Angeles

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‘son of saul’: film review.

Hungarian director Laszlo Nemes' first feature is a searing Holocaust drama set at Auschwitz, which premiered in competition in Cannes, winning the Grand Prix.

By Boyd van Hoeij

Boyd van Hoeij

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'Son of Saul' Review: Laszlo Nemes' Searing Holocaust Drama

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Son Of Saul Review

29 Apr 2016

Son Of Saul

At the end of François Truffaut's 400 Blows , its young hero famously turns to the camera and stares defiantly into the eyes of the audience. Imagine that moment magnified across two bleakly magnificent hours and you have this remarkable debut from Hungarian director László Nemes. It's a film that bores straight into your soul and leaves you shattered, but somehow richer for having seen it.

It's a film that bores straight into your soul and leaves you shattered, but somehow richer for having seen it.

Where Schindler's List adopted the perspective of those herded into the camp, Son Of Saul rides shotgun with one of Auschwitz's maligned Sonderkommando. Afforded special privileges in return for labouring in the gas chambers, Saul wears the haunted pallor of a man who know he's still destined to die, just not when or how. A red cross on his shirt is the only protection from a summary, anonymous death. The line between life and death has never been literal.

We meet Saul at the chaos of the camp railhead, shepherding his fellow Jews, terrified and disorientated, unwittingly to their deaths. The camera fixes on his face in shallow focus throughout, the chaos and horror of his world often just a background blur that's soundtracked by the bark of Nazi guards, the clank of metal doors and the muffled chatter of his fellow unit members.

In this maelstrom, Saul stumbles, somewhat improbably, upon a dead child he takes to be his son. From there, he embarks on a mission to find a rabbi to give him a Jewish burial, doggedly negotiating Nazi doctors, an all-pervading sense of fatalism and a planned camp uprising in his quest for recover some humanity from this hell. Face grizzled with the horrors he's witnessed, jaw fixed in determination, Röhrig's Saul lingers long in the mind. It's a remarkable performance, all the more so for being his first.

There's no easy sentiment here, no saccharine to sweeten the pill, but in reconstructing camp life in all its confusion, micro-detail and half-glimpsed horrors, Nemes lends its protagonist's quest something approaching mythical status. The result is a mighty testament to the human spirit - and its potential for depravity. Like Trauffaut's young hero, rebelling against his institution prison, it's a film that blazes with unforgettable defiance.

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Son of Saul and the Intimate Mechanisms of Genocide

The debut film by the Hungarian director László Nemes is a powerful, unsettling addition to the cinema of the Holocaust.

This is the first line spoken by Saul Ausländer (Géza Röhrig), 11-and-a-half minutes into Son of Saul , the Hungarian Holocaust drama of which he’s the protagonist. And these two brief words, when they finally come, are freighted with contradictory meanings.

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Saul is a member of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz, the Jewish prisoners who were tasked with escorting their fellow Jews into the death chambers and disposing of their corpses afterward. Though the status was presented by the Nazis as a privilege—the Sonderkommando could remain alive somewhat longer than their condemned brethren—it was in fact a deeper curse: They, too, would be exterminated in a matter of time, but only after being forced to collude in their own genocide.

In this sense, Saul’s “I will,” is merely the acquiescence of the enslaved, the acceptance of yet another in an endless series of grotesque duties. Yet given their context, the words are also a gesture of quiet defiance. Saul has seen the dead body of a boy he believes to have been his son: In volunteering to take responsibility for the corpse, he is setting in motion a plan—one which will serve as the central thread of the film—to spare the boy from the ovens and give him a proper Jewish burial.

Son of Saul is the debut film of the 38-year-old director László Nemes, and it is a work of remarkable power, a chilling investigation into the intimate mechanics of mass murder. We watch as the Sonderkommando herd unknowing victims into the “showers,” while German officers promise a hot meal on the other side. When the doors close, we watch them immediately begin to collect the belongings of the doomed, even as the latter begin to scream inside. Afterward, we watch them drag out the naked bodies and scrub down the floors for victims yet to come. We watch them shovel coal for the ovens; we watch them shovel human ashes into a river.

Most of all, we watch Saul. The camera hugs him close throughout almost the entire film, peering over his shoulder such that it presents the camp from his perspective while keeping his face (and the large red X on his back that marks him as Sonderkommando) in the frame. Nemes uses shallow focus both to keep the audiences’ eyes on his protagonist and to keep the horrors surrounding him—the arbitrary executions, the ever-present corpses—at a slight remove that’s simultaneously humane and disconcerting. The narrow, box-like frame of the film emphasizes a profound sense of claustrophobia and containment.

The movie is at once clinical in its accumulation of small details and dreamlike in its execution, a waking nightmare through which Saul somnambulates, the audience right alongside him. Röhrig, a poet as well as an actor, is fascinating in his opacity. Though the discovery of the boy has given him a goal, it’s clear that any larger sense of purpose he might have harbored has long since been extinguished. Survival itself seems hardly worth the effort.

Nuggets of genuine horror abound. The German guards refer to Jewish corpses as “pieces” (“Move the pieces!” “Burn the pieces!” “One Jew for one piece!”). The initial reason why the boy whom Saul believes to be his was singled out is that he didn’t quite perish in the gas chamber. In a cruel inversion, a white-jacketed Nazi doctor places a stethoscope on the boy’s chest to listen to his vitals, before covering his mouth and nose to end his breathing. An autopsy is commanded not in order to determine the cause of death but rather to determine the cause of non-death.

Even as Saul pursues his solitary mission, an uprising is being plotted around him. (There was, in fact, a Sonderkommando revolt that took place at Auschwitz in 1944.) It’s here that Nemes perhaps offers more detail than is necessary. The elements of the insurrection and the power dynamics between the various Sondercommandos—the kapos and oberkapos, the competing units—all remain decidedly hazy. Though perhaps that’s precisely the point.

Son of Saul has already won the Grand Prix at Cannes and the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, and it’s a clear favorite at the Oscars next month. It is not—if my description has somehow failed to make this clear—an easy film to watch. But it is a forceful and unsettling addition to the cinema of the Holocaust, a film that digs deeply into the gruesome workings of the death camps and ponders questions about duties to the living and duties to the dead.

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Inside 'Son of Saul', the Holocaust drama that was this year's most shocking Oscar winner

It was also last weekend’s most deserved victor. kaleem aftab talks to its uniquely qualified star and director, article bookmarked.

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Laszlo Nemes holds the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film for 'Son of Saul'

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At last Sunday’s Oscars, on a night when Spotlight upset the odds to win Best Picture, another film’s victory was a foregone conclusion: in the best Foreign Language Film category, the triumph of László Nemes’ haunting Holocaust drama Son of Saul had seemed inevitable ever since last May, when it debuted at the Cannes Film Festival, winning the Grand Prix du Jury.

But while the grave subject of the film may make it archetypal awards season fare, it would be wrong to dismiss Nemes’ debut as Oscar bait.

Unlike many Holocaust dramas, it is not merely reverential, but a shocking tour-de-force, fantastically shot on 35mm by Mátyás Erdély, whose camera barely strays from the face of Géza Röhrig, delivering a mesmerising, near wordless turn as Saul, a member of the Sonderkommando, the group of mostly Jewish prisoners who assisted with the Final Solution.

Nemes delivers one of the most realistic depictions of a concentration camp ever committed to celluloid; as the audience is given glimpses of the horrors going on as Saul goes about his day, the industrial sound of machines chugging away provides a foreboding soundtrack to the horror. Life is Beautiful, this is not.

It is all the more powerful for focusing on one of the least talked about, but most horrific aspects of the camps.

The Sonderkommando lead their fellow inmates to the gas chambers, taking jewellery from the corpses and burning the bodies.

On the day we meet Saul Ausländer, he witnesses a boy being killed and his moral compass points him to confront the authorities, not with guns, but a small act of defiance.

Saul decides that he must give the dead boy a traditional Jewish burial, where the corpse is watched over by a shomer, or watchman, before the body is quickly buried in the ground to the recital of scriptures and psalms, and the ceremony is finished off with a reading of the Kaddish prayer, conducted by a Rabbi.

This is a story about trying to do the right thing and following your conscience, no matter what the circumstances.

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Röhrig is a non-professional actor, and Saul was a role he was uniquely qualified for: since 2001, he has been a shomer at New York’s Plaza Jewish Community Chapel.

Nemes met him on a trip to America, at the apartment of a mutual friend. “I felt that it was destiny that this movie fell into my hands,” says Röhrig. “A professional actor cannot afford to give back a role, because he is building a career. I am not a professional actor. But, if I knew someone else, who in my mind could do a better job as Saul, I would have stepped back. I wasn’t worried about letting the director down. I actually felt, that it’s me.”

Indeed, Röhrig was initially offered a role as a friend of Saul. Deciding the part was not for him, he quit the production, only to be called back again after two weeks by the director, when they couldn’t agree a fee with the original actor cast for the part.

In this period, Röhrig read Gid’on Graif’s book, We Wept Without Tears: Testimonies From the Jewish Sonderkommando from Auschwitz, first published in Hebrew in 1999. “I kind of learnt it by heart,” he says.

Upon Röhrig’s return to the Hungarian set from New York, he was asked to do some improvisation. “They said tell me a day of yours, your routine. I described a day of mine, a 12 hour shift from 6am, all of a sudden I noticed that everyone was crying, that afternoon, they offered me the role. They kind of knew – I made a living with this subject matter.”

The shoot was a tough one for Röhrig, but toughest of all for the extras, as he reveals to me. “Oftentimes, we worked over time, the people who were naked and playing the corpses, most of them were homeless,” he says.

“There were hundreds of homeless, it was August, the sun was coming down, it was as hot as it can be, there were plenty of mosquitoes and these people have to lie on each other motionless, for a dollar a day. Nothing.”

Paying homeless people a dollar a day – is that true, I ask Nemes and the film’s co-writer Clara Royer? “Who said that?” they respond in unison. Röhrig, I reply. “Oops,” says László. “We didn’t end up with a lot of homeless people,” he continues. “We had special trained people for the corpses and things like that, not homeless people. There were a few homeless people [among the extras]. In Hungary, if you want to make a film, you have to give money – it’s not for free.”

For his part, Röhrig claims the homeless extras’ experience was a positive one. “So it was extremely moving to me and others, so still today, I had messages from some of these homeless, old ladies, ‘Géza, congratulations, I can’t wait to see the movie.’ And they are on the computer of the homeless shelter, and waiting in line, and they go on the Facebook, the page of the movie, so when I say it’s a team effort, I really mean it,” he says.

It wasn’t just his profession that pointed to him being a perfect Saul; Röhrig’s extraordinary life story has been orientated by the history of the Holocaust.

Born in Hungary in 1967, he was orphaned at the age of 4. He spent eight years in an orphanage before being adopted by a Jewish family. “My [adoptive] grandfather was in a Budapest ghetto. He had a car accident in the 1940s before the occupation – he lost one of his legs.

"So, when the Nazis came, they left him there: what are they going to do with a one legged man? He lost his first wife, his sibling, and his parents. I had a close relationship with him. Even though I wasn’t there, I know that my name was his last word, he said Géza when he died. That always stays with me. Somehow, it felt more like a previous life of mine.”

In high school, Röhrig refused to join the youth section of the communist party in Hungary. When he applied for university, he was told that he couldn’t be accepted, unless he was a member of the youth section, and so decided to move to Poland and study in Krakow.

At first he resisted going to Auschwitz, which is about 40 minutes away. In 1986, just before he had to return to Budapest, he finally went.

“It was still in Soviet hands, it was largely untouched, it wasn’t the tourist attraction at the time,” he says. “It was a snowy, December day. I ended up spending a month there.” Röhrig has written two books on the Holocaust, as well as a poetry collection featuring fictional portrayals of victims organised by their tattoo numbers. “So László, when he thought of me playing the role, he knew that I had an intense relationship with the subject.”

Now 48, Röhrig has four children with his second wife. While filming he tried to live as much in 1945 as possible, even demanding music be turned off; and as a practicing Jew, he refused to work on Saturdays.

He was happy that he didn’t have too much dialogue in the film, he says, because, “one of the things that I don’t like about myself is my voice. When I speak, even now, in my mind, this is not a good voice.”

It’s true that his vocal chords operate at a high octave, but it’s his screen presence and dedication to the cause that make the biggest impression.“I went to bed with this movie, I woke up with this movie. I lost a lot of weight,” he says. “I was by myself, without my family. The single purpose of mine during these 40 days was this movie.”

‘Son of Saul’ is released on 29 April

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User reviews

Son of Saul

A Jewish-Hungarian concentration camp prisoner sets out to give a child he mistook for his son a proper burial. A Jewish-Hungarian concentration camp prisoner sets out to give a child he mistook for his son a proper burial. A Jewish-Hungarian concentration camp prisoner sets out to give a child he mistook for his son a proper burial.

László Nemes
Clara Royer
Géza Röhrig
Levente Molnár
157 User reviews
323 Critic reviews
91 Metascore
65 wins & 61 nominations total

Top cast 99+

Saul Ausländer

Abraham Warszawski

Oberkapo Biederman
Bearded Prisoner
Rabbi Frankel
Saul's Son

Dr. Miklos Nyiszli

Russian Prisoner

Oberscharführer Voss

Oberscharführer Busch
Yankl (Young Prisoner)

Apikoyres (Greek Rabbi)

Hirsch (Gold Collector)
All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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The film cannot look beautiful.
The film cannot look appealing.
We cannot make a horror film.
Staying with Saul means not going beyond his own field of vision, hearing, or presence.
The camera is his companion, it stays with him throughout this hell.
Goofs The short text at the beginning says, that the members of the 'Sonderkommando' were killed after 3 months, but this is a simplification of the more complicated history. While it's correct that these men were supposed to be killed and replaced after a few months, in some cases they were killed much earlier and in other rare cases they could survive for over 2 years, like Filip Müller . This depended mostly on the skills of the individual 'Sonderkommando' slave worker, who was sometimes needed by the SS to train the new 'Sonderkommando' members, but also on pure coincidence and luck.

Abraham Warszawski : You failed the living for the dead.

Saul Ausländer : We are dead already.

Connections Featured in 73rd Golden Globe Awards (2016)
Soundtracks Dream Faces Written by William Marshall Hutchison Performed by Elizabeth Spencer

User reviews 157

Sergeant_Tibbs
Oct 20, 2015
How long is Son of Saul? Powered by Alexa
June 11, 2015 (Hungary)
Official Facebook
Official site (Spain)
El hijo de Saúl
Mafilm, Budapest, Hungary (Studio)
Laokoon Filmgroup
Hungarian National Film Fund
See more company credits at IMDbPro
€1,500,000 (estimated)
Dec 20, 2015

Technical specs

Runtime 1 hour 47 minutes
Dolby Digital

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Review: son of saul.

A simulation of the Holocaust death machine that aptly leaving one sick to one’s stomach.

Representations of mass murder, especially in the visual arts, are subjected to a level of scrutiny befitting the significance of traumatic memory. “To write poetry after the holocaust is barbaric,” said German philosopher Theodor Adorno shortly after World War II. Poets responded in retaliation, some with their finest work, and Adorno offered a memorable retraction: “Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream.” But what shape is that scream permitted to take, or is silence the more “appropriate” memorial? If you’re László Nemes, director of Son of Saul , the answer may be somewhere in between, as the tension between ethics and aesthetics in his depiction of the titular Sonderkommando, played by Géza Röhrig, manifests itself as a muffled squeal.

Nemes has expressed frustration with conventional depictions of the Holocaust, like Schindler’s List . That’s code for the sentimentality that Steven Spielberg’s embraces throughout his Oscar juggernaut, and it helps to explain Claude Lanzman’s championing of Son of Saul after its premiere at Cannes earlier this year. It may seem odd for Lanzman, a critic of graphic and sentimental representations of the Holocaust, to respond so strongly to a film where mass murder is so abundant and the main character, a Hungarian Jew, spends the duration of the story trying to find a rabbi to deliver the funeral prayer for a boy he delusionally believes to be his son. That is, until one realizes that Lanzman sees virtue in the way Nemes’s aesthetics defy direct representations of the Holocaust’s horrors and Saul’s existential plight.

Composed almost entirely of Jews, the Sonderkommando worked at death camps in exchange for special treatment, though none were guaranteed survival. If they were, it was almost certainly a lie. Son of Saul is unconcerned with passing judgment—like many did after World War II, most famously the German philosopher Hannah Arendt—on the Sonderkommando. Instead, Nemes’s camera affixes itself to Saul’s side in a kind of Dardennian lockstep, tracing in constricted close-up the ghoulish routines of the man’s day, from ushering unsuspecting Jews into gas chambers, to sorting through their personal belongings, to disposing of their bodies, so as to ostensibly give shape to his psychological duress.

Around Saul there’s only death, though the audience is pointedly never allowed to glimpse it directly in the face. After a boy miraculously survives the gas chamber, only to be subsequently suffocated by an SS guard, Saul becomes attached to him and devoted to giving him a proper burial. The camera then begins to worm its way through the gas chamber adjacent to which Saul lives, following him as he tries to find a rabbi, saving one from certain death only to then risk his own life in trying to sneak the man back into his living quarters—and all while helping to set into motion his fellow Sonderkommandos’ plan to explode their way out of Auschwitz.

As these plans braid together across the film’s narrative, and across Saul’s mind, the bodies of the dead, whether dragged out from gas chambers or falling into pits, register only as abstractions in the background of Nemes’s shots. The Germans, all prototypical cocks of the walk with merciless thirsts for violence, murder the Jews in their midst, but the camera is prone to catching Röhrig, or some random object within his view, calculatedly obscuring the exact moment when, say, an SS guard shoots a man point-blank in the head. Death isn’t foregrounded, only the perpetual fear of it as it registers on Saul and his fellow Sonderkommandos’ faces.

The technical proficiency of this cavalcade of horrors, abundant in long takes and shot/reverse shots so seamlessly edited together as to give the sense of the film being a single movement, is undeniable. But Son of Saul ’s meticulous orchestration calls attention to its dubious sense of purpose, which lies beyond human subjectivity. Saul’s struggle is one for agency, but his emotionlessness points less to recognizable human trauma than to Röhrig’s limitations as an actor. Röhrig may not make Saul’s delusions sufficiently comprehensible, but Nemes also doesn’t allow him to, as his aesthetics are geared toward fostering a sensorial rather than intellectual response. In resurrecting traumatic memory primarily for visceral effect, the film reveals itself as a simulation of the Holocaust death machine, aptly leaving one sick to one’s stomach, but also horrified by its simplification of reality.

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Movie Review: Son of Saul (2015)

Howard Schumann
Movie Reviews
One response
--> October 12, 2015

While no movie can fully capture the madness of what life in a concentration camp must have been like, László Nemes’ Cannes Grand Prize Award winning Son of Saul , his first feature film, may come close to recreating the experience. Written by the director and Clara Royer and shot in 35mm with a 4:3 aspect by cinematographer Mátyás Erdély (“ The Quiet Ones ”), Son of Saul explores the moral dilemma of a group of Hungarian Jews known as the Sonderkommandos who were forced to collaborate with the Germans at Birkenau in exchange for preferential treatment in the way of food and living arrangements, even though the bargain extended their lives for only a few months.

Set in 1944 only months away from liberation, Géza Röhrig is Saul Auslander, a Sonderkommando, inducted on his arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau under the threat of death and given the task of emptying trainloads of new prisoners, telling them lies about fresh coffee and an offer of employment after their shower, then, under the supervision of the SS, shutting the doors and standing to one side, listening to the screaming and crying. Saul’s job does not end there, however. He is charged with removing the bodies, referred to as “pieces,” from the gas chambers, confiscating any valuables they may have, and incinerating them in outdoor pits.

With the camera always focused on Saul, breathing down his neck like the Dardenne Brothers’ camera in “The Son,” he moves around swiftly going from one job to the next showing little outward emotion among the confusion. He stops long enough, however, to witness the body of a young boy still breathing after having survived the gas chamber. He will not remain alive for long, however, as he is quickly smothered by the camp doctor and his body removed for an autopsy. Apparently recognizing the boy and claiming him to be his son, Saul’s seeks a Rabbi who will say the prayer for the dead (Kaddish) and give the boy the required burial according to Jewish law and tradition.

When he is not performing business as usual, Saul’s desperate attempt to find a Rabbi takes up much of his time and he is accused by a fellow prisoner of being more concerned with the dead than with the living. Though there is no narration and a minimum of dialogue (spoken in a mix of Hungarian, German, and Yiddish), Saul’s expressive face reveals a cauldron of intense emotion, more than any language could hope to reveal. We never learn anything about Saul’s background, whether he was married or even had a son, but, in his desire to provide Kaddish for the boy, he is asserting his humanity in the face of barbarism.

It is a daunting task given the circumstances of the arrival of more victims daily, and the clandestine plans being made for a prisoner rebellion, an extraordinary example of physical resistance but it is Saul’s singular act of rebellion that adds a dimension to the suffering that transcends its apparent meaninglessness. Unlike Tim Blake Nelson’s 2001 film, “The Grey Zone” which covered similar territory but succumbed to standard Hollywood treatment, Nemes keeps graphic content to a minimum and relies on the viewer’s imagination, wisely letting the horrors to be assimilated through suggestion and an intentionally raucous soundtrack. Son of Saul is not an easy film to watch, but it is an important and even a necessary one and, in its own way, both a horrifying and strangely beautiful one. It is a film that should not be missed.

Tagged: funeral , son , survival , vancouver international film festival , WWII

I am a retired father of two living with my wife in Vancouver, B.C. who has had a lifelong interest in the arts.

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'Movie Review: Son of Saul (2015)' has 1 comment

October 12, 2015 @ 9:27 pm Leah

Wonderful review, Howard. Looks like a movie that can deeply affect one to their core.

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Review: 'Son of Saul' a groundbreaking Holocaust drama

László nemes' astonishing debut feature follows a prisoner (géza röhrig, outstanding) in a nazi death camp who fixates on a boy who survives the gas. nemes' direction is unique, focusing on the man..

Critic's rating: 4.5 stars out of 5
Director László Nemes lets the most horrific action play out in the margins of the film
Géza Röhrig had never acted in a feature, and is terrific as a man trying to retain his sanity and soul
The movie won a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film

What must we do to survive?

Faced with inhuman horror, suffering through life with a termination date all but stamped on your forehead while unimaginable suffering goes on around you — at what point does literal truth cease to be important? What lies must we tell ourselves to maintain even a semblance of sanity?

These questions and more are at the heart of "Son of Saul," László Nemes' shattering, inventively staged debut feature, a Holocaust drama like you have never seen before.

The film is set in a German death camp, most likely in the closing stages of World War II. Saul (Géza Röhrig in a brilliant, haunting performance) is a Sonderkommando — a prisoner whose life is temporarily extended by the forced labor of leading other prisoners to their deaths in the showers, then searching their belongings for hidden gold, jewels or other "shiny" valuables. After that, they drag the bodies of the victims — called "pieces" by the Nazi guards — to incinerators or, when they begin to overflow, to trenches. Think of that for a moment. At times, there are so many dead bodies the incinerators cannot accommodate all of them.

It is soul-shattering work, though one wonders if any soul at all remains after doing it for a while.

Nemes, who also co-wrote the film, based it in part on secret writings members of the Sonderkommando hid. What makes "Son of Saul" so unique, though, in addition to showing us the grisly day-to-day business of death camps, is the way he and cinematographer Matyas Erdely shot the film: The focus is almost entirely on Saul.

'Son of Saul' director L�szl� Nemes discusses terrific debut

The stunning long, opening tracking shot lets us know what Nemes is up to. We see Saul in close-up, as we will for much of the film, stoically leading men and women into a room, where they are told to strip down and clean up in the showers, then get something to eat. We know better, of course, and eventually, so do they.

But the focus remains steadfastly on Saul, with the camera either framing his face or following along just behind him. As men and women are herded into the showers, we see them along the margins of the frame. Instead, we are drawn to Saul's impassive expression, which is almost a relief.

The screams, the pounding on the walls and doors, play as horrific background noise. We are in Saul's head, experiencing what he does. It's as if he has developed an internal mute button to block out the reality of what is happening — what he is facilitating.

In the aftermath, the focus remains on Saul, as he and the other workers drag and stack bodies. Don't be fooled. Having systematic murder play out along the margins makes it no less disturbing. For Saul, it is a mechanism for survival, if not sanity.

But this is not just an exercise in cinematography. A boy miraculously survives the gas, at least for a time. He will become Saul's obsession, for reasons that have to do with truth and the stories we tell ourselves, with rituals that provide perhaps one last tenuous link to life as it was lived before.

Son of Saul (2015) | Phoenix Arizona Movie Theater Showtimes Reviews

There is also an uprising brewing among the prisoners, but Saul is now distracted. All of these storylines will come together by the time the film ends, not perfectly but with power. You find hope wherever you can when you think you have run out of places to look for it. "Son of Saul" offers Nemes' harrowing vision of the possibility of peace, at least within oneself. And it is a singular vision, one that demands to be shared.

In Hungarian, Yiddish, German and Polish, with subtitles.

'Son of Saul'4.5 stars

Director: Laszlo Nemes.

Cast: Geza Rohrig, Levente Molnar, Urs Rechn.

Rating: R for disturbing content and some graphic nudity.

Note: At Harkins Camelview at Fashion Square.

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Movie Reviews

Shallow focus creates depth of feeling in 'son of saul'.

Bob Mondello

Saul (Géza Röhrig) is almost always seen in a near close-up in Son of Saul , putting you right there next to him. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics hide caption

Saul (Géza Röhrig) is almost always seen in a near close-up in Son of Saul , putting you right there next to him.

The camera stays tight on a gaunt, weathered face as we hear a train and the dull roar of exhausted travelers disembarking at the outset of Son of Saul . The screen is narrow — almost square — so there's very little space in the image around his head. As a result, we hear but don't see a band playing as the train's passengers are herded into a building, then to a large room with benches and wall pegs.

The camera stays tight on this man who's ushering people silently. A red "X" painted on the back of his jacket marks him as a Sonderkommando , a prisoner who's being forced to work with the guards. He's different from the other prisoners, but the rest are out of focus anyway, stripping off all their clothes as an off-screen voice tells them, "You're exactly the kind of people we need in our workshops. After the shower and hot soup, come directly to me. Remember your hook number."

Then the door clanks shut behind them, and the gaunt man with the "X" on his jacket starts pulling the clothing off all those hooks people were urged to remember.

And after a bit, the screaming starts.

First-time Hungarian director László Nemes has been telling interviewers that he'd wanted Son of Saul to be an immersive experience, and it definitely is that. What he's immersing you in is Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi concentration camp, so it's not an easy sit, but it is a riveting, effective one, and a genuine change from the familiar conventions of most holocaust dramas.

The director's technique is to shoot almost the entire film in severe close-up on his leading man (Géza Röhrig), which has the effect of putting you next to him in Auschwitz. It also, because the director uses very shallow focus, has the effect of making the atrocities around him blurry and indistinct — which sounds as if it would make the film easier to watch, but actually makes it all the more horrific because you can't focus on what you're hearing: German officers mocking those on their way to slaughter, ashes shoveled into swollen rivers, killing frenzies for no apparent reason.

And filling most of the frame, always, is the man with the "X" on his jacket, who is consumed while we watch him by a single obsession: Though he has been present for thousands of murders, seen many bodies burn in the camp's crematoria, he is searching for a rabbi to give one body — that of a boy who died before his eyes — what he thinks is a proper Jewish burial.

"You've betrayed the living to help the dead," he's told when his single-mindedness puts a camp uprising in jeopardy. But that's a moral quandary that doesn't slow him for a second.

The character's narrow focus, the director's shallow focus, add up somehow to profound depth of feeling in Son of Saul . If there has been a more powerful cinematic experience this year, I didn't see it.

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COMMENTS

Son of Saul movie review & film summary (2015)
December 18, 2015. 4 min read. "Son of Saul" begins with a long, unbroken shot of mesmerizing intricacy. The year is 1944 at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Saul Auslander (Géza Röhrig), a member of the camp's Sonderkommando—prisoners forced to help the Nazis exterminate Jews, thereby delaying their own deaths for a few ...
Son of Saul
Mar 7, 2017 Full Review Brendan Cassidy InSession Film Son of Saul is one of the richest and most personal of all Holocaust films, backed by a stunning central performance and realized by a ...
Son of Saul is a brilliantly original vision of the Holocaust
Dec 18, 2015, 9:50 AM PST. Son Of Saul opens with an out-of-focus shot of an empty forest glade. The camera is handheld, but it still stands passively still for nearly two minutes, until ...
Son of Saul Is a Harrowing First-Person Look at the Holocaust
That resident is Saul Ausländer (Géza Röhrig), one of a group of Jews ("Sonder-kommandos") allowed to live (for a time) by performing the most grisly of tasks: transporting the bodies of ...
Review: 'Son of Saul' Revisits Life and Death in Auschwitz
Son of Saul. Directed by László Nemes. Drama, War. R. 1h 47m. By A.O. Scott. Dec. 17, 2015. The shape of the screen is unusually narrow in "Son of Saul," the 38-year-old Hungarian filmmaker ...
'Son of Saul' Movie Review: A Rigorous Holocaust Drama
January 8, 2016 6:06 PM EST. I n a movie, sometimes one face is everything. In Son of Saul, set in Auschwitz in 1944, Hungarian-born actor Géza Röhrig plays the Saul of the title, a member of ...
Son of Saul Movie Review
Our review: Parents say (4 ): Kids say (2 ): The full devastation of genocide, incomparable acts of cruelty, and humanity's ability to adapt to horror play out in the face of one man in this stunning, remarkable film. Other films have captured the Holocaust's atrocities and magnitude of heartlessness, but Son of Saul brings the more private ...
Son of Saul
Son of Saul is one of the richest and most personal of all Holocaust films, backed by a stunning central performance and realized by a filmmaker who has an incredibly bright future ahead of him ...
'Son of Saul' Review: Laszlo Nemes' Powerful Holocaust Drama
Film Review: 'Son of Saul'. Hungarian helmer Laszlo Nemes and actor Geza Rohrig make a powerful debut with this grim, unyielding Holocaust drama. Possessed by the same single-minded intensity ...
Review: Set in Nazi death camps, 'Son of Saul' is a powerful, immersive
The film "Son of Saul," set in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camps in 1944, is an unwavering vision of hell. ... Movies. Review: 'Blink Twice' plunges us into a potent fantasy island with ...
'Son of Saul' Review: Laszlo Nemes' Searing Holocaust Drama
'Son of Saul': Film Review. Hungarian director Laszlo Nemes' first feature is a searing Holocaust drama set at Auschwitz, which premiered in competition in Cannes, winning the Grand Prix.
Son Of Saul Review
Son Of Saul Review Auschwitz, late 1944. Saul Ausländer (Géza Röhrig), a member of the camp's privileged Sonderkommando, doggedly tries to find a resting place for a dead boy amid its horrors.
Son of Saul
Son of Saul (Hungarian: Saul fia) is a 2015 Hungarian historical tragedy film directed by László Nemes, in his feature directorial debut, and co-written by Nemes and Clara Royer.It is set in the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II, and follows a day-and-a-half in the life of Saul Ausländer (played by Géza Röhrig), a Hungarian member of the Sonderkommando.
Son of Saul and the Intimate Mechanisms of Genocide
Son of Saul is the debut film of the 38-year-old director László Nemes, and it is a work of remarkable power, a chilling investigation into the intimate mechanics of mass murder. We watch as the ...
Inside 'Son of Saul', the Holocaust drama that was this year's most
Inside 'Son of Saul', the Holocaust drama that was this year's most shocking Oscar winner. It was also last weekend's most deserved victor. Kaleem Aftab talks to its uniquely qualified star and ...
'Son of Saul': extraordinary acting in hell of Holocaust
Movie review of "Son of Saul": This Oscar nominee for best foreign-language film takes us into the heart of the Holocaust. Géza Röhrig's performance is an extraordinary feat of minimalism.
Son of Saul (2015)
Son of Saul: Directed by László Nemes. With Géza Röhrig, Levente Molnár, Urs Rechn, Todd Charmont. A Jewish-Hungarian concentration camp prisoner sets out to give a child he mistook for his son a proper burial.
Review: Son of Saul
Review: Son of Saul. A simulation of the Holocaust death machine that aptly leaving one sick to one's stomach. by Ed Gonzalez. December 10, 2015. Representations of mass murder, especially in the visual arts, are subjected to a level of scrutiny befitting the significance of traumatic memory. "To write poetry after the holocaust is barbaric ...
Movie Review: Son of Saul (2015)
While no movie can fully capture the madness of what life in a concentration camp must have been like, László Nemes' Cannes Grand Prize Award winning Son of Saul, his first feature film, may come close to recreating the experience. Written by the director and Clara Royer and shot in 35mm with a 4:3 aspect by cinematographer Mátyás Erdély ...
Review: 'Son of Saul' a groundbreaking Holocaust drama
1:41. Critic's rating: 4.5 stars out of 5. Director László Nemes lets the most horrific action play out in the margins of the film. Géza Röhrig had never acted in a feature, and is ...
Son of Saul
October 1944, Auschwitz-Birkenau. Saul Ausländer is a Hungarian member of the Sonderkommando, the group of Jewish prisoners isolated from the camp and forced to assist the Nazis in the machinery of large-scale extermination. While working in one of the crematoriums, Saul discovers the corpse of a boy he takes for his son. As the Sonderkommando plans a rebellion, Saul decides to carry out an ...
Shallow Focus Creates Depth Of Feeling In 'Son Of Saul'
NPR's Bob Mondello reviews Son of Saul, a Hungarian film about 24 hours in the life of one man trying to bury the body of a boy under the most dire of situations.
Son of Saul (2015) Movie Review
While Son of Saul is not quite as ubiquitously digestible as Spielberg's Schindler's List or Benigni's Life Is Beautiful, it still offers yet another unique and impactful take on the Holocaust that goes beyond showcasing its horrors or garnering sympathy for its victims to celebrate the will of those who lived through it, earning this ...

Son of Saul

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