The Nazi’s weren’t content with the devastation of all their other combined horrors. They also devised a Sonderkommando squad consisting of Jews forced to perform the disposal of bodies and other deplorable tasks related to the executions. Robbing them of their only comfort–that of innocence–the concentration camp commanders granted those in the Sonderkommando meager extras such as improved rations. They also gave them a slightly longer outlook for survival. Ultimately the Sonderkommando units were also killed. The goal was to eliminate “bearers of secrets” who witnessed the atrocities and could warn new arrivals of their likely fate.
In Son of Saul, first-time Hungarian director Laszlo Nemes, presents Saul Auslander (Geza Rohrig), an intense member of the Sonderkommando. We get to know him well since he is in virtually every scene but we hardly know him. The conveyance of his thoughts are overshadowed by and made unnecessary by an uncanny representation of his now primal responses. His reactions to overwhelming sensations are expressed in the subtlety of a flicker of an eye or a twitch in the face. Shot mostly in close-up, Saul avoids the gaze of his jailers. He reacts like an animal scurrying in a surrealist survival mode.
Nemes use a shallow-focused frame that blurs atrocities in the distance. Much of the terror is manifested through the use of rancorous sound. This not only preserves the natural reluctance in Holocaust art to shy away from anything resembling literal representation but also mirrors Saul’s presumed inclination to tune out the numbing horrors. That Nemes gives us fleeting visual glimpses of the affects of the horrors can be viewed as paradoxically both a compromise to tradition and a challenge to it.
Saul’s survival instinct takes on an allegorical context when he decides to mount an ostensibly futile yet fervid crusade involving a dead child. Saul’s search for a rabbi to perform Kaddish on the child’s corpse is a heroic quest by a desperate man eager to hang on to the slimmest crumb of his humanity. Yet Saul’s mission also takes on the intensity of a genre thriller. That aspect of the film and its highly aesthetic style have created a critical backlash amidst mostly glowing reviews. The 38-year-old Nemes has taken the most sensitive of possible themes and attempted to turn the Holocaust film on its head. A film can certainly be the most unique of holocaust movies without being close to one of the best. Son of Saul, however, in sheer terms of sticking in your craw, is not only a rare achievement but a seriously sublime one.