Son of Saul (2015) [Blu-ray]
Drama | Thriller | War

--- Subtitled ---

October 1944, Auschwitz-Birkenau. Saul Auslander is a Hungarian member of the Sonderkommando, the group of Jewish prisoners isolated from the camp and to assist the Nazis in the machinery of large-scale extermination. While working in one of the crematoriums, Saul discovers the body of a boy he takes for his son. As the Sonderkommando plans a rebellion, Saul decides to carry out an impossible task: save the child's body from the flames, find a rabbi to recite the mourner's Kaddish and offer the boy a proper burial.

Storyline: Two days in the life of Saul Auslander, Hungarian prisoner working as a member of the Sonderkommando at one of the Auschwitz Crematoriums who, to bury the corpse of a boy he takes for his son, tries to carry out his impossible deed: salvage the body and find a rabbi to bury it. While the Sonderkommando is to be liquidated at any moment, Saul turns away of the living and their plans of rebellion to save the remains of a son he never took care of when he was still alive. Written by LaoKoon

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Martin Liebman, April 27, 2016 Son of Saul is almost too difficult to watch, but it's too good and too rewarding not to watch. Director László Nemes, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Clara Royer, has crafted a bleak but purposeful masterpiece with his debut feature that earned an Oscar for Best Foreign Language film. The film takes audiences inside the Nazi concentration camps and explores a little-known facet of life inside for a select few prisoners who were privy to the brutality and inhumanity that ultimately cost six million Jews their lives. Through its intimate and immediate discomforts is an unforgettable film about the search for a sliver of humanity in a place where none otherwise exists.

Most prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps are gassed. A few select prisoners, known as "Sonderkommando," are not only aware of what is happening, but they're tasked with the dirty work of cleaning the facility -- brushing blood off the floor, removing the bodies, and eventually spreading mounds of ashes -- to accommodate the next group of victims. One of these Sonderkommando is Saul (Géza Röhrig), a Hungarian Jew. A routine clean-up reveals one victim, a young boy, to still be alive. The boy is quickly put to death by suffocation. Saul claims the boy as his own. In the midst of the hellacious and inhumane conditions, he seeks only for the boy's body to be spared dissection and cremation and that a rabbi perform a proper burial service. In the meantime, Saul finds himself in the middle of a plot to get word of the camp to the outside world.

As life in the Nazi concentration camps must have been hellishly deplorable, emotionally destructive, and spiritually difficult, so too is Son of Saul. The movie elicits a sense of immediate discomfort, aguish, anger, fear, confusion, and frustration, but these are, in their own way and for the sake of the movie, dramatically positive qualities that are necessary to shape and tell the story with the proper thematic foundation and emotional resonance. One of the film's earliest shots depicts Saul standing along a wall, blankly gazing into nothing as tortuous screams and the painful sounds of death emanate from behind a nearby closed door, behind which an unknown number -- at least dozens, maybe more -- of people are dying. It's a stark contrast between the relative outward numbness he seems to feel versus the visceral, angry shock and disgust that courses through the audience. For the viewer, that stoic sense of disconnect never materializes. The movie is a constant challenge to sit through as it engenders waves of negative emotions that are a response to negative imagery, but the turnaround is a reminder of the value of life and the things in the world that are worth fighting for, whether that be a grand cause against mass murder or one's need to maintain a sense of dignity and normalcy in a world where both have been all but bluntly forced out of existence.

As if the narrative weren't already bleak, the film itself is claustrophobic and nearly as ugly from a visual perspective as it is in many of its dramatic components. Director László Nemes and Cineatpographer Mátyás Erdély have photographed the movie in a tight, personal manner. Many shots are intimately close to the subject -- mostly Saul -- and backgrounds are blurred jumbles of imagery, including piled bodies. The 4x3 framing further squeezes the frame and adds to the sense of personal tension and inescapability. László Nemes' framing is exceptional and a remarkable driving force in not only capturing the movie, but shaping it well beyond the visuals and using it to emphasize emotions while creating a huddled, hurried feel to the character. The movie further constructs its narrative, visually, with a dank, inhospitable tint to where the sum total of the dreary, green, gray, and yellow dominant scheme almost takes on the consistency of vomit, which again only further accentuates the overall tone. Performances are fantastic. Every actor carries a unique response to their work and place in the hierarchy of the camp, whether German or Jew. Géza Röhrig is remarkable in the lead, and so are all of his fellow actors. Much of the movie's success comes from their ability to convey so much through body language and look within that tight framing, though certainly the script, as written in part by Röhrig himself, is very well done and a critical support piece to a movie that's visually arresting for all the right, and thematically wrong, reasons.

Son of Saul is a deeply, darkly serious film that's as immediately disturbing as any film before it but more emotionally rewarding than many. The film's ability to so precisely convey its story and themes by way of the performances and visuals is remarkable. László Nemes has, in one film, proven himself a filmmaker with incredible vision and understanding of how the medium -- the imagery, the words, the performances, the manner in which it's assembled and presented on the screen and around the screen by sound -- can so precisely work together to construct one of the most important movies about the holocaust. Sony's Blu-ray release presents the movie with detailed and immersive audio. Video quality isn't appealing, but it's effective within the movie's contextual needs. Supplements are small in quantity but excellent in quality. Highly recommended, though this isn't a movie with especially high replay value, as good as it is.

Trivia:________


[CSW] -3.8- This reviewer said it so much better that I could and touched on all the points that I thought were most important:
Unadventurous viewers should be warned: this film very literally is designed to give you the experience of being a worker at Auschwitz. The entire film is shot from Saul's point of view (on scrupulously researched and reconstructed sets); when his eyes are unfocused, so is the camera. As you might imagine, he tries to avoid directly looking at the horrors surrounding him, so we glimpse them fleetingly, usually in the periphery -- which actually makes them all the more overwhelming. The sound design is brilliant, too; we hear what he would hear, a cacophony of voices from Germans and prisoners. The result is one of the most powerful films ever made, but obviously not one for all tastes. I think that very few viewers will make a strong emotional connection to Saul, because it is literally unimaginable to see oneself in his shoes. But the connection we can make is entirely sufficient to make the story always engaging. And contrary to another early review, the movie is entirely credible; Saul uses a bit of guile on his quest, but mostly survives a few dangerous situations because of luck, confusion, and (once) bureaucracy, and he is not, overall, particularly competent. Just intensely human. (And, yes, an explanation is eventually given -- although you will have to work out some details for yourself -- for why he takes the boy to be his son.)
[V4.0-A4.5] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box.


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