A rugged face comes into focus at the start of Son of Saul, an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film. Running to the tune of shrill, piercing whistles, the rugged man, Saul, wearing a red X on the back of his soiled coat, is helping herd a crowd of confused men, women and children wearing yellow stars. The camera follows Saul and his hard-faced, red X comrades into a camp as martial music blares and guard dogs bark. Saul accidently bumps into an SS officer and doffs his cap lest his mistake be construed as an insult. The camera pursues Saul and the crowd into a building whose iron door snaps shut.
Inside, a comforting voice promises lodgings, food and employment in a nearby workshop—but first, the new arrivals must take a hot shower. “Remember your hook number,” the voice says helpfully, encouraging the people with the yellow stars to neatly hang their clothes and head for the shower. “Hurry or the soup will get cold.”
Anyone with even a glancing knowledge of the Holocaust will know where this is headed. The shower room is really a gas chamber and the guards will consume the soup.
Directed and co-written by Hungary’s László Nemes, Son of Saul is probably the most artfully harrowing Holocaust film ever made, exceeding Schindler’s List for being set entirely in the innermost circle of hell. Saul, the protagonist, is a Hungarian Jew in a Sonderkommando, the death camp prisoner detachment marked with the red X and given the dirty work. They must scrub the blood from the gas chamber’s cement floor, burn the corpses in the crematorium and shovel the ashes into a nearby river. In exchange, they receive a short-term lease but not a purchase on life. The SS tended to rotate Sonderkommando personnel, eventually sending them to the gas chamber and replacing them with other prisoners desperate to survive.
Hungarian actor Géza Röhrig gives Saul a brooding, eventually obsessive portrayal. While working to haul away the profusion of pale, nude corpses, he hears a choking sound. A young boy remains alive, struggling for breath. “Get back to work!” the guards shout but Saul is transfixed as the SS doctor arrives and orders the now dead child to the autopsy room. Nazi medical science is curious to learn how he survived the gas for so long. Saul is determined to somehow get hold of the boy’s body, find a rabbi among the prisoners and give the child the semblance of a decent burial.
Not until late in Son of Saul are his reasons revealed, but the movie’s title gives away the clue. Nemes filmed Son of Saul on 35-millimeter stock with a palette of deep grays and greens, the setting’s darkness broken by the pallid bodies of the dead and the lurid fires lit to dispose of them. The camera tracks the protagonist as he steps and stumbles through the sprawling charnel house, driven by a spark of hope that some particle of righteousness can be found amidst degradation on an industrial scale. Son of Saul offers no respite from the brutality of the death camps and the anxiety of death.
Son of Saul
4 stars
Géza Röhrig
Directed by László Nemes
R
