Son of Saul: Living in the Death Factory

There’s a grassy field with some indistinct trees, the distant sound of birds, and a few clusters of vaguely perceived people on the periphery, although we have no idea who they are or what they are doing. Seemingly out of nowhere, someone is walking toward us. Like most everything else, this person is a blur, a mirage-like image of a man. He comes closer and closer, then stops just as his head and shoulders fill the screen and come into sharp focus. He is a rugged looking guy, in rough clothing, with a face that might be handsome, but is instead grim, noncommittal, and emotionally dead.

So begins Son of Saul, the riveting, award winning debut feature directed and co-written (along with Clara Royer) by Hungarian filmmaker, László Nemes. The man onscreen is Saul Auslander, a Hungarian Jewish prisoner at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp/extermination camp.  It is October 1944, and Saul is in a dreadful, horrific situation. He is a member of the Sonderkommando, a cohort of Jewish prisoners separated from the rest, who were forced to participate as laborers and functionaries in the extermination of their fellow Jews. The Sonderkommando were not complicit with the SS; they did not volunteer. They were slaves, and any refusal to participate in this grisly work meant immediate death. Eventually, they too would be gassed. Very few survived the war.  As I said, Saul is in a horrific situation.

He has become a robot, a zombie, so traumatizing is his work. The job includes removing corpses of victims from the gas chambers. One day he discovers among the bodies a young boy still breathing, just barely.  The boy soon dies, but Saul, taking the lad for his son, decides that he must protect him from the ovens, find a rabbi to recite the Kaddish (the ancient mourner’s prayer honoring the deceased) and then give him a proper burial. Under the circumstances of Auschwitz, this seems a preposterous, impossible plan, but for Saul it becomes an obsession. One that gives him a reason to live.

Son of Saul is not an easy film to watch and is probably not for the faint hearted.  But it is a powerful and memorable motion picture that deserves to be seen. Its vivid depiction of life and death in the extermination camps is unlike any other feature film or dramatization that I have ever seen – providing an emotional, visceral and yes, a spiritual experience that stayed with me long after the lights came on. This was by design. Director Nemes’ aim was to put us in Auschwitz alongside the protagonist, to cut through the intellectual remove that typically allows us to merely watch rather than fully experience movies. In some respects, this is an uncomfortable, assaultive experience – but it seems to me a worthwhile one, which uniquely provides some understanding of what it must have been like to be there.

Nemes was able to do this, in part, by making the Auschwitz environment as realistic as possible. Much research went into the development of the story, the sets, the atmosphere and the events surrounding Saul's journey. But Nemes also believes that for cinema to deeply reach the viewer emotionally, the viewer’s imagination must be engaged. Too much information gets in the way. If the movie tells us about the death camp, we may learn some facts, but we will not understand or experience what it was like. 

So Son of Saul eschews a comprehensive, documentary-style perspective on the Shoah, in favor of an indirect but boldly intense experiential approach – one that narrowly focuses on the experience of the eponymous Saul.  Nemes intentionally provides less visual information than we are accustomed to, and hews to a narrative framework that depicts only Saul’s immediate physical surroundings and the visual and auditory information available him. The sound is frequently enveloping.  Much of the photography is shallow focus,

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There is no overarching attempt to convey the broad scope of the holocaust. There are no panoramic shots of corpses stacked like firewood or of emaciated camp survivors, no melodramatic scenes spotlighting terrified families being torn apart, nor is there swelling soundtrack music to stir our hearts. Intellectually, we know of these things going in. Emotionally they are so shocking as to be almost unfathomable.   Saul has been living in the nightmare of the extermination factory for so long he no longer notices this stuff or at least tries not to. And although we see him working in this Inferno - escorting newly arrived trainloads of victims, taking their clothes and possessions, falsely reassuring them to keep them calm on the way to the “showers’; afterwards, removing the dead, washing down the place, shoveling ashes, and so forth – the camera takes Saul’s point of view, and so nearly all of this is in the background, caught in glimpses and/or out of focus.

But, even through Saul’s POV, we notice. We can’t help it. We see and hear all of this stuff, and the effect on us is actually enhanced because of Saul’s indifference and because of the camera’s seeming indifference. Our imagination is engaged, we are forced, in a way, to participate in the experience, to fill in the gaps, to make what we are seeing and hearing comprehensible. And the result is an incredibly immersive.  So when, early on, we see and hear a jumbled crowd being herded from the station to the death house, and we catch a few fleeting glimpses of individual men and women and their children, and of their fear, desperation and confusion, as we also hear snatches of their voices and the barking of camp guards, the terror is palpable, unmistakable, immediate and very affecting.

What Son of Saul also conveys through its imagery and cacophonous soundtrack, in a more immediate and personal way than any other film, is the mechanization, the assembly line nature of the final solution. The industrialization of this process also implicates the obvious fact, frequently overlooked, that the Nazi extermination campaign was not just a product of uniquely evil psychopaths in the Hitler hierarchy. This was a military-industrial complex of murder designed, developed and operated by tens of thousands of people. Ordinary people. As Nemes puts it, "What people never understood about Auschwitz. It's already there. It does not need the devil to be there. It was constructed by humans and designed to kill human beings, and so it was extremely functional. It's not as if it was on another planet.”  This is what humanity is capable of – not just them, us.

So what was the point of having Saul pursue the impossible, trying to give a dead boy a proper Jewish burial? Nemes, again: “That’s the question the audience has to ask and to answer during the course of the film. When there is no more hope, no more God, no more religion, is there still a possibility for a voice, a voice within that would allow us to remain human? That’s actually a part of the film. In this place where people are not only killed but burned, and their ashes scattered, in a way they are being erased from the world, erasing for these people their very history; so by doing what he does, Saul actually accomplishes the greatest revolt that there can be. Trying to give history back to someone.”

Geza Rohrig plays Saul. Rohrig is a poet, teacher and scholar, but not a professional actor. Yet, he holds our attention and carries this film, being in virtually every frame throughout its 109 minutes. He has deep, dark eyes and a face a bit like Belmondo with hints of Brando (but with Paul Newman lips).  It is a subtle and restrained performance, through which he beautifully conveys Saul’s existential pain and agony, along with his reawakened passion, commitment and, eventually, surprising hope.

This review originally appeared in EatDrinkFilms, an online magazine worth checking out. 

Son of Saul is currently in limited, but expanding release in the US.  In San Francisco, it is showing at the Embarcadero Cinema, and will expand to other select theaters in the region on Friday January 22.

107 minutes.