Son of Saul (2015)

How do you make an honest film about the Holocaust? You need to communicate the scale of the tragedy, depict the dehumanising machinery which carried it out, balance the banality and enormity of its evil, and – if you’re making a drama, not a documentary – do it all in one story. Your protagonist needs to stay alive. The victims of the Holocaust who stayed alive were the sonderkommando – conscripts who participated unwillingly, in the process of herding Jewish prisoners into the gas chambers and getting rid of all evidence of their existence, from their discarded clothes to their corpses to the bloodstains, so the next batch could be killed in the same way. They bore witness to all of it and lived – for a time.

Son of Saul follows two days in the life of Saul, a sonderkommando who discovers a boy in the gas chamber who isn’t quite dead. The boy is taken away and quietly strangled by a Nazi doctor. For the entirety of the long shot that begins the film, Saul has been in shallow focus, the background intentionally blurred, and the camera has doggedly followed him so we can absorb the zombie-like blankness of his creased, ash-covered face. His detachment is a necessity. But when the boy is strangled, he looks back and it slips. It was his son.

Saul tries to find a way to give him a decent burial. The film is largely consumed with his effort to secure his son’s body (the doctors want it for an autopsy), find a rabbi who can say the Kaddish, and find a burial place. It’s poignant and futile. Even those around him – Abraham, the sonderkommando rabbi – tell him to let it go, inured to brutal death and unceremonious cremation, but Saul will not be moved. All along, Abraham and others are organising a rebellion, which quietly goes on in the blurred background of the long shots of Saul moving feverishly through Auschwitz.

The film is pitched precisely in order to show the truth without exploiting or offering false redemption. Saul’s son is already dead. It’s understood what he wants to do will change nothing. Even in his newfound agitation, he retains the glassy blankness of shellshock, rather than beating his breast or sobbing. He never stops moving, and so the horrors of the camp become visible around him – the edges of the frame reveal corpses stacked like firewood, pools of blood being methodically mopped up to maintain the illusion that the gas chamber is a shower room. The camera does not move through the wall to watching people dying, although it could have mined horror from the sight – it sticks with Saul, who stands by the iron doors as the frenzied banging of the people inside gradually slows and stops. We all know what happened. The suggestion is as effective as depiction, and it offers some dignity. There is no manipulative orchestral soundtrack, only the diegetic sounds of a concentration camp.

The film is an unrelenting experience, owing to its subject matter, its spare presentation of long tracking shots focused on Saul’s hollowed face, the chaotic melees of prisoners unloading and firefights, and owing to the purpose which pushes it forward. Abraham, who needs Saul to do his part in the sonderkommando rebellion, tells him to stop – the boy wasn’t even his son. It might be the case, but what drives Saul has become about more than family ties – he is trying to do a kindness which is all the more meaningful because it’s futile, amidst endless death and desecration. The boy’s death should be recognised. It should affect someone. It should matter.

The narrow scope of Son of Saul suggests the enormity of the holocaust in the same way that the claustrophobic framing lets the atrocity seep in at the edges, sparing us the full sight without letting us ignore it. In the routine of Saul’s day – scrubbing away blood, digging mass graves, throwing crematorium ash into the river – we see the massive organisational effort behind the Nazi attempt to not only kill the Jewish people, but to erase them as if they had never existed. Against all that, Saul seems heartbreakingly quixotic, an impression at odds with the studied blankness of his demeanour. He is all the more poignant because he doesn’t seem capable of caring, and yet he does, to the exclusion of everything, including survival.  

The sonderkommando were not allowed to die. They had to facilitate the deaths of their kin instead. All they could do was bear witness. Son of Saul bears witness. It’s not only gripping, but deeply meaningful, expressing a unified purposed in its story, performances, and filmmaking – a stunning achievement from first-time director László Nemes. Not a film you’ll want to see, but perhaps one you should.