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This intensely powerful film manages to provide a new way of seeing a subject that remains bigger than any one film can deal with.
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But Saul becomes fixated on the idea that this boy must have a proper burial, and the rest of the film follows him as he roams the camp in a near-suicidal fashion trying to find a Rabbi to perform the last rites. As a medical curio to the Nazi doctors, he doesn’t survive for long. It’s while doing this that he discovers a young boy who has somehow survived the gas. At first Saul’s job is to help calm the new arrivals and herd them into the gas chambers he and his fellows then collect their clothes (checking them for valuables) and help drag the corpses away. His position is a mixed blessing: the sonderkommando get to live while thousands die, but their own deaths are assured as part of the Holocaust they’ve helped perpetuate. The year is 1944, the place is Auschwitz, and Saul Ausländer (Géza Röhrig) is a member of the sonderkommando, Jewish inmates who the camp guards use to perform menial tasks. It’s a brilliant literalisation of his central character’s mindset trapped in a hell and forced to serve his tormentors as a cog in a machine whose output is death, the only way for him to make it through each day is to avoid facing the horrendous reality head-on. Thirty-eight year-old Hungarian director László Nemes’ debut film is shot in shallow focus, with his lead constantly front and centre while everything around him is lost in a fuzzy murk. Son of Saul brings that horror home in perhaps the most counter-intuitive way imaginable: by focusing so closely on one man that everything going on around him is a blur. For all its ghastly aspects, the sheer scale of the Holocaust is where its true horror lies.