Son of Saul

The poster for Son of Saul.

Son of Saul is a Hungarian drama that won the Grand Prix at Cannes (the film festival that is; it didn’t win a Formula One race or anything), and is in the running for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars.

It’s set in Auschwitz, and is about the Sonderkommando.  If you don’t know, the Sonderkommando were inmates who were forced to clean the gas chambers and ovens, and collect the belongings of the people who were killed in the Holocaust.  It’s a grim, gripping, great film.

Stanley Kubrick once said about Schindler’s List “Think that’s about the Holocaust? That was about success, wasn’t it? The Holocaust is about 6 million people who get killed. Schindler’s List is about 600 who don’t.” I hope I’m not giving too much away by saying Son of Saul is no Schindler’s List.

Saul – played by Géza Röhrig, in what is his film debut – is a member of the Sonderkommando at the camp.  The film follows him – and literally follows him; the camera more often than not sitting just behind his shoulder, as he goes about his terrible work. You only see glimpses, out of focus, of events happening – people being put into the gas chambers, or shot in ditches and cremated using flamethrowers.

The main story is about Saul, and his efforts to give a proper burial to a child who he believes to be his son in the camp. As he does this, he gets caught up in an attempt to sabotage the ovens in the camp by means of gunpowder in the ovens, and he witnesses the photographing of the camps by the Sonderkommando (all our footage of the camps comes from after they were liberated; only a few photos, taken surreptitiously, exist of them in action).

You are never quite sure whether the boy Saul wants to bury is actually his son or he’s slowly going mad, but it’s a fascinating film, and its surprising that it was director Laszlo Nemes’s first film. The ending offers a glimmer of hope, which is quickly taken away.

It’ll only get a small release, probably, but it’s as good a film about the Holocaust as you’ll see, and not at all uplifting (and therefore closer to the truth). If you can’t stomach the nine and half documentary Shoah, then watch this. It’ll be well worth tracking down when it comes out in April.