Hungarian World War II drama following the horror one Jewish prisoner experiences when forced to assist the Nazis in burning his own people, but attempts salvation when he finds his (supposed) son’s body. Winner of the Grand Prize of the Jury award at Cannes and nominated for the Palme d’Or.
October 1944, Auschwitz-Birkenau. Saul Ausländer is a Hungarian member of the Sonderkommando, the group of Jewish prisoners isolated from the camp and forced to assist the Nazis in the machinery of large-scale extermination. While working in one of the crematoriums, Saul discovers the body of a boy he takes for his son. As the Sonderkommando plans a rebellion, Saul decides to carry out an impossible task: save the child’s body from the flames, find a rabbi to recite the mourner’s Kaddish and offer the boy a proper burial.
The horror of the Holocaust has been cinematically depicted more times than the horror of Freddy, Jason, and sharks combined. How can a film possibly stand out in an emotionally challenging area that also feels overcrowded? Son of Saul finds a way.
Full reviewA masterful exercise in narrative deprivation and sensory overload that recasts familiar horrors in daringly existential terms.
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Thanks to his taste, rigor and superb sense of control, Nemes manages to create images that are both discreet and graphic, respectful and confrontational, inspiring and unsparing.
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It pushes its vision to the bitter end, eschewing emotion, reflection, or intellectual framing as if banned at gunpoint from any such lapses.
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By any standards, this would be an outstanding film, but for a debut it is remarkable.
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No matter how many Holocaust films you've seen, you've not seen one like this.
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Utterly uneasy to watch but strikingly and confidently assembled, the film is a powerful aural and visual experience...
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