László Nemes’s Son of Saul is a harrowing drama we recommend with a warning: its closeness to one prisoner is exhausting. Géza Röhrig holds our attention even when the burial quest starts to repeat itself.
László Nemes keeps Son of Saul close to a man whose attention has narrowed to a single task: securing a burial for a boy he believes is his son. Saul Ausländer is a Sonderkommando prisoner at Auschwitz, and the extermination around him continues while he searches. This is a harrowing, exceptionally controlled film, and we recommend it with a warning about how little relief it allows. Its force comes from asking us to follow Saul without making his determination easy to understand.
Géza Röhrig gives Saul a face that seems to have learnt not to respond. The performance is spare enough that we begin scrutinising it for any indication of what he can still register, while his concentration on the burial becomes increasingly troubling. He does not make Saul seem noble simply because he wants to bury the boy, a useful restraint in a story so open to sentimentality. Even with so much attention paid to it, the face remains difficult to read.
Mátyás Erdély’s camera stays close, often leaving the surrounding atrocities indistinct in a shallow field of focus. The restricted view makes it hard to settle our bearings or see how the camp is laid out. The long handheld shots keep us beside Saul, with the blurred activity behind him demanding attention that the image will not satisfy. We were horrified by the violence we could hear while we were held on his impassive face. The narrow framing made us feel trapped without pretending that watching a film could tell us what imprisonment there was like.
Sound does much of the work that other films would give to explicit images. Its overlapping layers make the violence feel horribly routine: it continues beyond whatever Saul happens to be doing or looking at. The music credited to László Melis leaves much less impression than the layered noise around Saul, a useful choice when a more insistent score might have told us how to respond. Looking away scarcely reduces the strain when the noise keeps reaching us from outside the frame.
László Rajk’s production design gives the camp the appalling ordinariness of an industrial workplace. The blurred surroundings still suggest work continuing beyond the little of it we can see, and nothing feels arranged simply for our inspection. Matthieu Taponier’s editing lets the long takes run without giving us frequent changes of view to break the strain. The movement has the urgency of a thriller, but there is little pleasure in anticipating the next disturbance. Following Saul requires sustained attention to images that are deliberately difficult to examine.
The screenplay by Clara Royer and László Nemes sometimes returns to Saul’s determination after we have understood it. Once the burial has absorbed his attention, another stretch of urgency does not always deepen our sense of the man. The closely following camera can become predictable, and a pause would occasionally tell us more. These passages are tiring in a less useful way than the rest of the film, briefly making us notice the technique when we ought to be watching Saul.
The film does not suggest that Saul’s wish to bury the boy can make the surrounding atrocity comprehensible. Its suspense carries a risk familiar to war dramas: following a character so intently that the surrounding victims become scenery. Keeping those victims audible makes that danger harder to ignore, even when Saul’s task has absorbed our attention. See it when there is room to give it your whole attention, and do not plan on an easy conversation afterwards.
