We see things in the background of the frame, somehow made more disturbing by remaining indistinct. Here’s a man who has spent the last months of his life never looking past the 10 feet in front of him, in order to keep the greater terror obscured.

He agrees, but only since it grants him some freedom of movement to pursue his own goal.ĭirector László Nemes, in his directorial debut, uses a roving camera with a shallow depth of focus to keep our perspective in line with Saul’s. Meanwhile, the Sonderkommando leader is organizing a rebellion and escape, and Saul is lured into the plot. He sneaks through the camp, putting his own life at risk and those of other Jews, trying to find a rabbi and get the body out. But Saul’s obsession is less about preserving the boy’s dignity than reclaiming some measure of his own humanity. Is this really his child? It seems more like delusion. Saul claims him as his own son, and becomes determined to see the lad given a proper Jewish burial, with a reading of Kaddish by a rabbi. But one day he observes a boy who somehow survived the deadly gas but is then coldly suffocated by a German doctor. Saul (Géza Röhrig) is quiet and grim, known for blending into the background and keeping his head down. They are ferrymen on the river of death, destined to become passengers themselves. Their reprieve is temporary, though, as the Nazi regime makes sure to cycle them out every few months to eliminate evidence of their crimes against nature.

This Holocaust drama from Hungary looks at the Sonderkommando - Jews kept alive and granted a sort of immunity to shepherd their fellows into the gas chambers, and then load the bodies into the crematorium or earthen pit. A deserved winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film “Son of Saul” takes a very innovative approach in telling a familiar and heartbreaking tale.

Son of saul film