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Saul is making the only possible choice, yet it may not be the right one.SON OF SAUL is a tragic story from Hungary about a Jewish man’s experience as a member of the Sonderkommando, the group of Jewish prisoners forced to assist Hitler’s National Socialist thugs in large-scale extermination. Ambiguity swirls through the picture like flickering sparks around a fire. At one point a colleague admonishes Saul, “You failed the living for the dead,” and he’s not wrong. His obsessive pursuit threatens the whole undertaking. Even as he’s trying to preserve the boy’s soul, his fellow prisoners, knowing their own execution is imminent, plan an escape. And though his mission is noble, there’s never any certainty that he’s doing the right thing. It’s almost as if he’s trying to protect us, too. He’s our guide on this tour of Hell, but he’s a deeply humane one. That’s all the more reason to stick close to Saul, which is clearly the movie’s design. Disturbingly blurry images often lurk just on the periphery: Human corpses still pink with life are dragged as if they were animal carcasses (camp officials refer to them as “pieces”), and the movie’s sound design is distressingly effective-the victims’ screams may be muted, but there’s no blocking them out. Nemes keeps the camera moving almost constantly, focusing mostly on Saul’s face, though also quite often on his back-he wears a gray coat with an X marked on it, and there’s no way to avoid fixating on it. Still, you should brace yourself for the experience of watching it. It moves so quickly, and relies so little on dialogue, that you need to race a little to keep up with it, and to keep your eyes open every second. For all its intensity, Son of Saul is never ponderous. Its director and co-writer, Hungarian filmmaker László Nemes (making his feature-film debut), isn’t just re-creating unspeakable sadness but electrifying it with a kind of somber energy. Son of Saul doesn’t give the audience anything so falsely comforting as a happy ending-how could it? But it treats suffering as a living, breathing entity, not just as a dramatist’s tool or a means of punishing an audience.
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But if it’s a demanding film, in the end it isn’t a despairing one. There’s no way to describe Son of Saul, winner of the Grand Prix in Cannes last year, without making it sound like one of those movies you know you ought to see but will find any excuse to avoid. It’s the last thing that can keep him human. But everything in Saul’s face-a haunted woodcut, painfully alive to everything around him-tells us that this small but highly risky gesture is imperative. In the context of the surrounding horrors, it’s a fool’s errand. Saul witnesses all of this-in fact, we’re with Saul every moment, so we’re at least brushed with an awareness of his surroundings-and becomes consumed with saving the boy from the knife and finding a rabbi to recite the Kaddish. Saul is on duty when a boy, near miraculously, survives the gas chamber-the young man is quickly put to death by a camp doctor, and an autopsy is ordered, to determine what made him so tenacious. In Son of Saul, set in Auschwitz in 1944, Hungarian-born actor Géza Röhrig plays the Saul of the title, a member of the Sonderkommando, special groups of death-camp prisoners forced to dispose of the bodies of their own people-only, before long, to face extermination themselves. In a movie, sometimes one face is everything.