Unable to deaden himself any longer to the horror around him, Saul has unconsciously devised a way to reconnect with the world he once knew, with its age-old system of values and abiding faith. But he has, of course, a larger kind of sanity.

By all accounts (including that of a woman he encounters who might be his wife), Saul has no son. There’s no way to engage with Son of Saul without spelling out its central conceit, which means you should read no further if you want to be “surprised.” (I’ll be discussing the ending, too, so beware.) As the film goes on, it’s more and more apparent that the boy is not Saul’s son. It’s a perilous quest because (a) the boy’s body is marked for dissection and (b) men identified as rabbis are promptly murdered by the Nazis. The boy, he tells a fellow worker, is his son, and he must bury the body in a formal Jewish ritual, with a rabbi present to say the traditional prayer for the dead. I tried to comfort myself with the thought that he was unconscious and would not have lived long anyway - some comfort. Carried from the showers, he is avidly scrutinized by Nazi doctors and then, in a long, hazy shot, suffocated. That exception is a teenage boy who somehow survives a gassing. The blurring has a dramatic function: to suggest that to do his job, Saul has had to screen out his fellow Jews’ identities, even their humanity. Instead, we see parts of bodies, blue-gray limbs and torsos, often blurred along with the backgrounds. The faces of the corpses - with a sole exception - are offscreen. Nemes and his cinematographer, Mátyás Erdély, photograph Son of Saul almost entirely from Saul’s fevered vantage, which is, in one respect, a mercy. That resident is Saul Ausländer (Géza Röhrig), one of a group of Jews (“Sonder-kommandos”) allowed to live (for a time) by performing the most grisly of tasks: transporting the bodies of men, women, and children from the showers to the crematorium and/or cleaning up the mess left behind. I admit that I watched in a defensive crouch, afraid of what I might see next and torn between admiration for the courage of its 38-year-old Hungarian director, László Nemes, and doubts about the device he invented for going where no fictional filmmaker has gone before: to put the audience in the head of a camp resident on a quixotic - to say the least - mission to find spiritual closure. Set amid the Zyklon-B-dispensing showers and corpse-disposal facilities of the most infamous Nazi extermination camp, Auschwitz, Son of Saul is difficult for most people - especially Jews - to sit through, much less write about, much less criticize. Photo: Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classicsīe advised that this review addresses the entire narrative of Son of Saul, including revelations as well as the ending of the film.

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