Movie Review Son Of Saul

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Spoiler alerts – 2015 A harrowing, deeply moving Hungarian movie about the role of the Sondercommandos at the Concentration Camps (Auschwitz in the movie). Sondercommandos were forced to escort inmates to the gas chambers, collect their belongings and clothing, drag the corpses to the crematoria, and clean up the shower blocks ready for the next group of victims to be brought in. Unlike most of the victims, the Sondercommando units knew what would happen to the doomed inmates. They often had to help select victims, especially the elderly, disabled and too young to work, as soon as the trains brought them in. The Sondercommandos had to promise the targeted groups that they would get a nice shower followed by soup and light work details. This helped to stop panic and resistance. The Sondercommandos are often seen (in other movies and in some survivor accounts) as Nazi collaborators, sometimes taking to their work with sadistic glee, but the team (known to the SS as the keepers of secrets) had no choice in their duties, often found their own family and friends among the victims, and though they were better fed and not subjected to the usual brutalities, they were usually executed themselves after three months and replaced by fresh Sondercommando teams. Very few Sondercommandos survived the war. In the award winning film, the first made by Lazlo Nemes, Geza Rohrig plays Saul, a Sondercommando late in his period of service, seemingly numb to the shocks that his duties can give him. However, when a young boy is pulled still alive from the heap of bodies after a mass-gassing session, his feelings of paternalism kick in. Any hope that he might save the boy end when a Mengele type doctor suffocates the boy and plans to do an autopsy to establish how he might have survived in the gas-chamber. Saul claims (it is never stated if he is telling the truth), that the boy is his son, and steal the corpse away to try to find a rabbi to get the boy a proper Jewish burial. Unfortunately, the man he finds is only claiming to be a rabbi as part of his own survival strategy, which causes more danger to himself and Saul. Worse, their conflict risks exposing an attempt by some of the inmates to overthrow control of the camp and destroy its crematoria ovens (a doomed attempt that really happened in 1944). The film is shot in unusual styles, with Saul in close up, and much of the action happening off-screen or in purposely out of focus peripherals. Saul is seen a more concerned with mourning the dead than serving the needs of the living. Much of the film looks dusty and grimy and it becomes apparent that this is due to the constant slow rain of human ash coming down after the cremation processes. I found a sequence of the Sondercommando teams shoveling ash into the river particularly grim as it is clearly a never ending chore. A brutal, unsentimental, assertive film about the greatest horror ever perpetrated by men upon men. A film that simply must be seen so such horrors are never repeated. Arthur Chappell