Son of Saul
Directed by László Nemes
- war
- drama
- thriller
The story
In the horror of 1944 Auschwitz, a prisoner forced to burn the corpses of his own people finds moral survival trying to save from the flames the body of a boy he takes for his son, seeking to give him a proper Jewish burial.
What it’s like
Tight, claustrophobic close-ups hold a single face in an academy-ratio frame while the world blurs into shallow focus behind it, so the camera feels like a body moving through the crowd, always a step behind the action. The palette is drained to grey, mud-brown and sickly green, lit by flat overcast daylight, dim barracks bulbs and the orange glow of furnaces. Sound does most of the work: shouted German commands, muffled footsteps, the clatter of machinery and distant gunfire pressing in from every side, with almost no score. Set in 1944 at Auschwitz, where a Sonderkommando prisoner is forced to work the crematoria, it is harrowing and relentless. Violence and death are mostly glimpsed, blurred or heard off-screen rather than shown in gore, but the dread is constant and the atrocity lands hard, with no comfort or release along the way. The pacing is slow and oppressive, with long takes that refuse to cut away. It suits serious viewers seeking a demanding, morally weighted film about survival, grief and complicity, and it is not a fit for anyone wanting something gentle.
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