SON OF SAUL is a devastating and rightfully traumatic debut feature from the Hungarian director Laszlo Nemes. For 107 minutes he keeps his camera tightly focused on his protagonist - Saul Auslander (Geza Rohrig) - so that we only see the context of his action on the edge of the screen. We soon become grateful for this obscurity and start to wish that he had been as kind on our aural sense. Because everywhere we hear the mechanics of fear and death.
Saul is a Sonderkommando in an un-named death camp. As the movie opens he's helping newly arrived victims hang up their clothes before a "shower". He is ordered to stand next to the door of that room and hear them killed before he goes to the business of clearing up their clothes, washing out the room and disposing of the bodies. As the film goes on we will explore every part of that process - the men who stoke the fires of the crematorium with coal, the men who dump the ashes in the river, the men who perform the autopsies. All of them victims, and all of them living with the threat of being on the next list.
Saul is a Sonderkommando in an un-named death camp. As the movie opens he's helping newly arrived victims hang up their clothes before a "shower". He is ordered to stand next to the door of that room and hear them killed before he goes to the business of clearing up their clothes, washing out the room and disposing of the bodies. As the film goes on we will explore every part of that process - the men who stoke the fires of the crematorium with coal, the men who dump the ashes in the river, the men who perform the autopsies. All of them victims, and all of them living with the threat of being on the next list.
