Son of Saul (2015)

I love this movie so much

A Major Disappointment

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

I found this film offensive. In a concentration camp where people were being sent to the gas chambers a guy will focus his efforts in burying a corpse and risking his life and other people's lives to achieve his goal. Meanwhile other prisoners are busy with an escape plan and he spoils part of the plan because of his stupid obsession. In his situation his priorities should be: stay alive, escape and help to save other people's lives but his aim was to bury a cadaver only because of his stupid beliefs.

"Saul fia" is a unique, extremely powerful and potentially traumatizing cinematic masterpiece. A debut of Hungarian director László Nemes and co-writer Clara Royer, the film is a horribly realistic vision of Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944.The unfathomable horrors of the concentration camp are shown from a singular perspective: the Hungarian protagonist Saul is a member of the Sonderkommando, a group of typically Jewish prisoners who were afforded extra rations and liberties for assisting in the mass extermination of their fellows. They were executed after their service which averaged around three months.The film opens as a new shipment of prisoners arrives and is guided by Saul and his peers to the gas chambers. As members of the Sondercommando, their job is to get the prisoners into the chambers with no panic arising, collecting their goods for processing and cleaning up the chambers from signs of genocide by the next batch. They are in a hurry. The Allies are closing in, the amount of destruction is scaled up, just in case. The opening is sickening to watch and especially to listen to.As Saul cleans the floors of the gas chamber he discovers one young boy has survived the gassing. He is taken to an autopsy after getting suffocated by the doctors. Saul realizes that the boy must be his son, and decides to do anything in order to give him a proper Jewish burial instead of the ovens. We follow Saul on a desperate quest to retrieve the boy's body and escape just long enough for a burial. He also roams the camp for a rabbi to perform Kaddish for burial.Saul is played by New York -based poet Géza Röhrig. He hasn't acted in anything else for almost three decades and is completely brilliant in what must have been an incredibly painful role. He plays a hollow man, but his hollowness is a force of nature in and of itself. His dead eyes still haunt me.The entire film is shot with virtually one take. Cinematographer Matyas Erdely's camera follows Saul intensely as he walks through the unfathomable inferno of Auschwitz for two days. Shallow focus shows Saul clearly while his surroundings remain blurry. The aspect ratio creates a claustrophobic box around him. We see all the horror but can't make it out in detail. We hear everything.I'm not entirely sure about the suggestive approach; it's certainly better than showing everything in focus but in a reduced manner. A clear, realistic depiction of all that we know went on might simply be too much for any audience to bear. Also, one of the most chilling points achieved by the shallow focus is in conveying the complete sense of detachment Saul feels about the things he sees and must participate in. He exists beyond morality, even beyond survival until he reconstitutes through his son. But for his quest, he's already dead. This also shows us viewers how easily we all get detached. People become bodies become waste out of focus. Just like when psychological dehumanization takes effect.At times the movie feels even tedious while it conveys absolutely incomprehensible cruelty in action. That tedium is intentional. Two hours is enough for one to turn apathetic in the face of genocide. A lesson frighteningly current. And not only in the film's homeland where antisemitism and general xenophobia seem to have emerged as the new normal but also all around Europe as well as the rest of the world. We are weak, fearful and passive, and because of that we can turn into vessels for acts of absolute evil."Saul fia" is one of those movies that I find powerful- even masterful- in the extreme but so traumatizing on so many levels that I can't directly recommend it to anyone. It exposes humanity at its weakest, darkest and most dangerously passive, just as it exposes every viewer.

Son of Saul blew me away in so many respects. This is quite an unusual film in so many ways, from the direction to the unique and successful way it delivers emotions. It tells a simple story, but anyone will realize how powerful it is by simply reading the synopsis.The one thing that first struck me about this film is Géza Röhrig 's performance as Saul. Given that this story unfolds in Auschwitz and all the horrors that are being depicted, emotions are delivered in quite a subtle manner, on one hand picturing the main character as a man carrying heavy emotional baggage, and on the other showing some surprising inner strength, fostered by his newfound quest of morally surviving by burying the body of a dead boy. László Nemes' direction is quite unique, as it consists of pretty close shots of the protagonist with everything surrounding him out of focus, leaving some of the horrors to the imagination at times, and creating a tense, hellish atmosphere in other scenes - always maintaining this emotional intimacy between the audience and Saul. Had Röhrig not been as stellar as he was, this could have been quite heavy - and borderline unwatchable. Honestly, this was quite a gamble - but the audacity paid off.You will not hear any music throughout the entire film. Again, I felt like it added to the subtlety in the delivery of emotions, as it never dictates how the viewer should feel - leaving Saul as the only true vehicle of emotion. Instead, with everything but the protagonist out of focus, the sound (which is very well executed) complements the blurry background and brings it to life in all its chaos, tension and horror. You don't always clearly see what is happening around Saul, but you certainly hear and feel it with him.The ending alone makes it worth watching the entire film. It is brilliant and it brought me to tears - not because it's sad, but because I was brought there emotionally through this entire experience, which culminates with a truly moving and beautiful moment. Very highly recommended.

I won't spend too much time on this review other than to say that, with an IMDb rating of 7.5, I expected a much better movie.I quite understand why the director invested so much time and effort in trying to engage the viewer in the main character's view of the atrocity that must have been life in one of the Germans' extermination camps during WWII. The message was conveyed loud and clear that survival for Saul and those like him was a minute by minute matter. Alive this minute and with a bullet in the brain the next if he even looked at one of the SS Officers or guards.Having said that I understand the reasons for trying to engage the audience by use of very unusual cinematography, I must say that I found the idea of looking at the back of Saul's head for almost the entire length of the movie, with everything else around him being thrown out of focus was, after about ten minutes, not only distracting but also extremely annoying. Of course there's a morbid fascination even these days at what the Nazis did during WWII, and it is true that we've seen similar movies made many times over the years. But rarely has a movie on this subject been so annoying and ultimately unsatisfying.I wanted to like this movie "Son Of Saul" but I just couldn't forgive it the infuriating lack of focus on the events that were going on around Saul, rather than on the back of his head and its small and insignificant place in the camp.JMV