Review of Son of Saul (2015) by V H — 18 Feb 2016

Saul is a Hungarian Jew in Auschwitz. He's somewhat fortunate to be a member of the Sonderkommando, a group of prisoners selected to be on work crews who get better food and living conditions than regular prisoners in order to keep them healthy. Unfortunately, most of the work has to do with disposing of the corpses of fellow prisoners, referred to by the Nazis as "pieces". Also, most crews are kept for only a few months before they're killed off en masse and replaced with a new one, so the reprieve from death is only temporary.

"Son of Saul" encompasses two very action-packed days in Saul's life. While frenetically dragging the "pieces" from the gas chamber to the crematorium, a boy is found alive and gasping for breath. After unceremoniously snuffing the remaining life out of him, the guards order that his body be brought to the doctor for an autopsy before cremation. Despite this being just one dead body out of thousands, his death touches a nerve with Saul and he makes it his mission to give him a proper Jewish burial. He tells his fellow prisoners that the boy is his son, though those who knew him pre-Auschwitz doubt the veracity of this claim.

The timing of Saul's personal mission could not be worse, as it seems that the men of his Sonderkommando are about to be "downsized", hastening the urgency of a long-planned revolt. While most of the group is focused on the impending uprising, Saul is more concerned with retrieving the dead boy's body and tracking down a rabbi to perform the burial ritual. To paraphrase a disgusted fellow prisoner, Saul is deliberately choosing death over life.

The beginning of this movie is unforgettable, like a dark instructional video entitled "Death Camp Operation for Dummies". A train pulls in and new arrivals are ushered into a changing room and instructed to leave their belongings on hooks before being herded into gas chambers with the promise of hot beverages. While they're being summarily executed, a Sonderkommando team quickly rifles through their clothing collecting "shiny things" and disposing of the rest. Once finished, the team rushes to the gas chamber to drag out the dead bodies, after which they scrub down the floor in preparation for the next group. It's a model of German efficiency.

After that, things get a little muddy. Though I knew the gist of what was happening on a big-picture level - Saul wants to find a rabbi and there's an impending rebellion - I was always hazy about what was going on at any given moment. The camera spends much of its time following several feet behind Saul, who's clad in a tattered black jacket with a big red "X" on the back, as he scurries from place to place interacting with people whose roles I was unsure of, jumping on and off trucks, repairing a doorknob, shoveling ashes into a river, clearing dinner plates, and offering bribes of pilfered "shiny things" as needed.

One might argue that the details are unimportant, that my fuzziness about what seemed to be a hierarchy among the prisoners didn't matter, nor my confusion about Saul's apparent freedom to move about the camp, being commandeered to work for whoever happened to spot him even when he was already in the middle of working for someone else.

On the other hand, after getting somewhat inured to the atmosphere of death and violence, it's difficult to sustain a high level of focus based on mood alone. I know, what a jaded person I must be to get bored in a movie depicting a concentration camp, but it's hard to relate on a human level when presented with such a delusional and self-serving protagonist.

This film is definitely worth seeing for its fresh take on the Auschwitz experience, portraying it as cutthroat, every-man-for-himself world inhabited by people seemingly devoid of human emotions. Though it gets an "A" for "atmosphere", it doesn't trouble itself with character development or creating empathy. I was about to refer to it as the "anti-Schindler's List" but I just googled and discovered that Claude Lanzmann, the director of the Holocaust mega-documentary ,"Shoah", already did, so I feel compelled to couch my observation in this clunkily-worded sentence rather than have you think I stole it.

Damn you, Internet.