SON OF SAUL (2015)

In László Nemes’ Son of Saul / Saul fia, we follow its eponymous protagonist constantly. The camera moves with him as he conducts his day-to-day duties as a Sonderkommando, a concentration camp prisoner who shepherds the unfortunate souls led to the gas chambers, then scrubs the chambers clean once these killing rooms have served their purpose. It’s not just that Saul is hardly ever out of sight that makes the film’s unique framing notable, but that anything which exists more than a few feet away from him is blurry and indistinct.

It’s a fascinating stylistic choice, partly because it renders these background subjects conspicuously inconspicuous, where your eyes are drawn to them and you’re left to question what their presence, and the film’s overall presentation, signifies. That latter point is answered by what Saul represents in these characters’ lives. He is a dead man walking, aware that one day he will also be killed through the same methods that he helps to facilitate. He can’t allow himself to feel pity for these people, because the waves of dead bodies will not stop flowing towards him; the last thing he can do is let their despair figuratively flow through him to further erode his spirit. He doesn’t appear to pity himself, either. He is a mere husk of a human being, shuffling forward, diluting his existence to the menial labour wrapped up in brutality.

Naturally, he avoids eye contact with these poor souls, just as he must avert his eyes from the gaze of the Nazi officers who either demean or ignore him. You hardly even see these guards, yet can instantly tell when they have approached, as Saul stiffens up and these brief interactions ooze with unease. In their offhand ways they further strip Saul of any semblance of personhood, much like his tasks at hand. There’s hardly any personhood in Son of Saul, just monsters and their victims, the latter group being so close to death that to reckon with their humanity would be soul-destroying for this protagonist. In an environment where hope is stifled by the ebb and flow of these mass executions, there’s no room for thoughts of the future, memories of the past, dreams, ambitions, and hopes. There are only the immediate surroundings to contend with, and those are horrific enough to leave one too exhausted by the sights, sounds, and smell of death to think of anything else.

All of this is informed by the film’s visual style, which also works on a formal level as this protagonist wanders through elaborate set pieces. It’s true that the visual borders of this reality are very tightly drawn, to where one can never glimpse the entire spectacle of the film’s more showy sequences, but you can appreciate the craft behind them all the same, since your eyes are constantly drawn to the corners of these images. The fact that these are all one-takes adds to their absorbing qualities, for a while, at least; though Son of Saul boasts arresting visuals to convey the misery behind the scale of this regime’s violence, the film’s commitment to its striking visual style highlights its overarching flaws.

You don’t watch this film for its screenwriting; there’s little of note there. There are no poetic flourishes to the dialogue, just like there isn’t any ability for these characters to ruminate on their fate. Their concerns are far more immediate, until Saul comes across the body of a boy, and believes it to be his son, hoping that he can give it a traditional Jewish burial. As for whether it is or isn’t his child seems to matter little. It is a symbol of hope in a place bereft of the opportunity to dream of a better life, let alone live it. But though this is a compelling idea—as well as an effective, if slightly on-the-nose symbol—it features a non-journey of a storyline that feels more like an exercise in style than an attempt to tell a story. The real story here is the brutality, but once that’s been established there isn’t much left for the film to do.

In this case, restraint becomes its own style, which is taken to such extremes that it winds up feeling artificial. Viewers are effectively being asked to stare at the dim imagery of the camera’s background objects at every turn, which, even if this works brilliantly in its own right, takes us away from Saul’s dilemma. His interactions with other prisoners do little to wrench back one’s attention over time, with scene after scene of him helplessly attempting to recruit people to his cause. Some agree, some refuse, and others take an age just to respond. Just as Nemes intriguingly pokes and prods at the elasticity of the film’s visual borders and overall stylisation, he inadvertently does the same thing to its plot, laying bare the unsound foundations that it is built upon. These characters and their overarching story never coalesce to form something greater. The film does an excellent job of establishing its soul-deadening misery, but all it does from hereon out is attempt to reinforce it, and that reaches its ceiling in terms of emotional investment long before the end credits have appeared.

Son of Saul‘s style frames this narrative in more ways than one, similarly to Nemes’ short film With a Little Patience (2007). In that film, an office clerk goes about her daily tasks, with little of note throughout her mundane activities as the camera only captures her and her immediate surroundings. After eight minutes of this, we learn that there are Jewish prisoners being rounded up just outside her office, finally glimpsing that her banal world is far more evil than she can recognise. On the one hand, the short film never quite justifies such lengthy non-events before its climactic final scene, yet that slow pacing is ultimately necessary to hammer home its denouement, where evil can be so readily ignored. Son of Saul doesn’t hinge as profoundly on the strength of its shot compositions and how they’re framed, but also unlike With a Little Patience, it could be trimmed significantly into a 30-minute short film and retain its most essential qualities.

This is especially true given Géza Röhrig’s phenomenal leading performance, who looks drained of hope from the very first moment we witness him on-screen. Hearing his voice for the first time is a shock, since you hardly expect pleading words or a soft tone from a man who looks like he’s lost all of his humanity. To watch this broken man break out into a smile is nothing short of a revelation, helping to hammer home the film’s meditation on the power of hope. But it takes an age, and far too many similar scenes of the everyday brutality of this concentration camp, to get there. Röhrig is superb at both repelling the viewer through his ravaged expression and endearing us to his cause when he starts to show interest in the boy’s body, so much so that little time is needed to understand how this environment could have moulded the person standing right before us. His face tells its own story and does so in just a few minutes, further confirming that a feature-length runtime isn’t necessary for the film to achieve its purpose.

Like Saul, the film keeps limping forward, but if one continues to look for the glimmers of light amidst this repetitive journey, there is plenty of reason to keep forging on and seeing it through to the finish line, where Son of Saul’s denouement wonderfully captures and crystallises its themes.

HUNGARY • FRANCE | 2015 | 107 MINUTES | 1.37:1 | COLOUR | HUNGARIAN • YIDDISH • GERMAN • RUSSIAN • POLISH • FRENCH • GREEK • SLOVAK •HEBREW

Cast & Crew

director: László Nemes.
writers: László Nemes & Clara Royer.
starring: Géza Röhrig, Levente Molnár, Urs Rechn, Sándor Zsótér, Todd Charmont, Jeles András, Márton Ágh & Juli Jakab.