Nearly every
year there seems to be a Holocaust film competing (often successfully) for
award-season recognition. Last year it was Poland ’s
Ida that won Best Foreign Language
Film at the Academy Awards, and this year Son
of Saul received the same accommodation for Hungary Hungary
The simplicity
of the narrative in Son of Saul
allows for the filmmaking focus to remain on approach, which is ambitious
without every becoming flashy enough to overshadow the power of the subject. In
a series of precise tracking shots, the camera remains tied to the title
protagonist, Saul Ausländer (Géza Röhrig). Saul is a Hungarian member of the
Sonderkommando, the group of Jewish prisoners forced to help the Nazis in the
dirtier tasks involved with the genocide of their own people. Tasked with
corralling victims into the gas chambers, Saul approaches the job with a
necessary disconnection until witnessing the death of a small boy who initially
survived the poisonous gas, claiming the child as his own. Determined to give
the young victim of the extermination camp a proper burial, Saul begins a
dangerous covert mission to steal the boy’s corpse.
With an
extremely narrow depth of field keeping little beyond our protagonist in focus
and an unconventional Academy aspect ratio, Son
of Saul is claustrophobic in the way it limits the audience’s perspective
of the events. We remain tied to Saul in his desperate mission, tracking him
through the daily routine at the extermination camp. Stylistically, the
cinematography is somewhat similar to Birdman,
within a narrative aligning closer to Schindler’s
List. The precise technical choices are effective without calling attention
to the filmmaking, including a soundtrack that is so subtle that it may go
unnoticed by many. And though there are certainly some harrowing moments of
Holocaust atrocities, first-time filmmaker László Nemes wisely refrains from
making this the focus of his narrative. What we do see of the violence is
mostly out of focus, though the sound mixing for the film is effective in
bringing us into this world in a far more haunting fashion. We have seen these
horrors onscreen enough times that merely including an effective soundtrack of
the violence is enough to engage the audience’s imagination.
Although
Röhrig’s experience as an actor was limited prior to this film, his performance
is what binds the narrative together with the filmmaking style. Much of the
movie relies upon his subtle reaction to events. With the cinematography
limiting what the audience sees, we rely upon Saul to be our eyes; we react to
his reaction of events. For this reason and many more, it makes sense that
Röhrig, Nemes and cinematographer Mátyás Erdély participated in a Q&A at
the Museum of Tolerance
Entertainment Value:
7.5/10
Quality of
Filmmaking: 10/10
Historical
Significance: 10/10
Special Features: 8/10
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