Director: László Nemes
Writers: László Nemes, Clara Royer
Cast: Géza Röhrig, Levente Molnár, Todd Charmont
Cinematography by: Mátyás Erdély
Music by: László Melis

Son of Saul ended and the credits rolled, but I could still hear the sounds of the film. Not music, because there was none, luckily. Those were the sounds of loud orders of SS, shovels, digging, machine grindings, noisy motors, cries, screams, more shovels, more orders, cries, wails, screams. This deafening, annoying, irritating noise continued even outside the cinema, combined with the burning smell, which you could feel in the film. But, the smell felt is that of burning bodies. Of war. Of hatred. Of evil and absurdity. Of human insignificance. And of human banality. These sounds and smells linger on for a while, even when people start talking to you, you are deafened by them, you can’t hear anything else. This carries on for hours. For days, maybe. It’s impossible to forget these sounds.

I started with the sounds, which may make Lazlo Nemes’s debut feature film (heretofore, assistant director of master Bela Tarr) be all about sounds, soundtrack, and no images. Because the camera work – sublimely executed by Matyas Erdély, in format 1.37 - “foregrounds” these sounds. Erdély’s camera follows Saul Auslander – his name aptly referring to the first Jewish king Saul and Auslander meaning ‘foreigner’ (“outsider”?) in German - and his journey through hell, mainly composed of close ups or medium shots. In the midst of absurd Sonderkommandos “jobs” (such as divesting and ‘preparing”, herding and urging newcoming human bodies into the gas ovens, incinerating them, after which the bodies become just “pieces”, as referred to in English and clumsily translated to some languages, the subtitles I’ve witnessed, as “remains”, which fails to render fully the dehumanising process), Saul sees a small boy’s body (almost still breathing), claims it as his own and starts his hellish search for a Rabbi, who will give the boy a Kaddish (prayer for the dead) and a burial according to the Jewish tradition. This is the main storyline of the film, the script is written by Nemes and Clara Royer. If this were a mainstream Hollywood film, it would probably end up in a mediocre melodramatic story on human suffering, with religious overtones.

{niftybox background=#8FBC8F, width=365px} But Nemes does something completely different, unexpected and unconventional. Instead of showing the suffering – gas chambers, mass torture, violence and atrocities – he avoids the unrepresentable and focuses on Saul’s search (including his aberrant behavior concerning some of his “job duties” and resistance movement), played wonderfully by Géza Röhrig in which we, the viewers, participate from the first shot onwards, in medias res, by camera constantly breathing by his neck, as if we were on the chase with him, almost identifying with his absurd search. Yet, we are drawn to it and believe with him in this project doomed to failure, from the beginning to the end, we believe in Auslander’s private grief in the face of millions dying, which seems absurd at the first glance. {/niftybox}

Sometimes, the camera is too claustrophobic and voyeuristic, even too frequently and too much, with no depth of field – and this, along with Géza Röhrig’s too attractive face for this hellish landscape, is my only criticism of the film – but, perhaps, that was Nemes’s goal: to achieve suffocating, nauseating sensations that will haunt us for a long time. And maybe even Géza’s handsome face and highlighted masculine shoulders make him appear more human in the process of total dehumanisation.

Son of Saul, the 2015 Cannes Grand Prix winner, is, put simply, a film on atrocities of Auschwitz. Many other films come to mind (Lanzman’s masterpiece, Shoa, first of all, Schindler’s List, Pianist etc.), but no film, made so far, can compare to the actual camp Auschwitz Birkenau, even decades after the bestialities committed. I remember visiting Auschwitz and not being able to forget it months afterwards, including many sleepless nights. The “aftermath reality” of the Aushwitz reality is much more striking than any on-screen images one could ever see. Or imagine. It is the smell of death, of machinery of mass torture, of the evil incarnated, of human suffering and pain which stay with you for a long time. The space of these rooms, the instruments of torture, various human remains (“remains”, what an unfortunate word!) seem so real and gluey, that it’s impossible to imagine the “real reality”, the real experience of a concentration camp, the reality of human disgrace.

And some questions never get answered: how real was your experience of visiting the camp of death? It was not real at all. Some will say it depends on one’s sensitivity how this is lived, experienced. To me, the reality of the experience excludes the insensitivity of those who immediately rush to eat a hamburger at the nearby McDonalds (or similar to it), so thoughtlessly placed outside the death camp, as if they’d done their duty and could now eat happily. How can my reality of the just seen and felt compare to those who can calmly and innocently devour their big Macs? It cannot.

{niftybox background=#8FBC8F, width=365px}And this is precisely what Nemes does with his images. They don’t look real. They don’t show atrocities, bestialities, torture, pain. Images are dim, blurred, vague, foggy, like Dante’s Hell. Pain is only felt, Dante’s Hell in our minds. You are never sure what’s happening, but you hear the sounds of torture and the lack of humanity. {/niftybox}

I have mentioned the word “absurd” too often in the above text. Maybe on purpose and maybe because I lack other words to describe horrors committed on humans by humans (Arendt’s Banality of evil?) and because this visual and sound experience is so vertiginous that it incites a physical reaction, without representing the horror of the unrepresentable and never resorting to pathos.

The images are left to the imagination of the viewer. And I’d stay away from comments on the film and divisions of “hard to watch films and easy, light, entertaining” - this would be another contemptuous stance of film art (when have other arts been divided along the harsh lines of “entertaining, amusing, light, pleasant, transient” vs. “upsetting, unsettling, impactful, profound, insightful, universal”? The first part of the non-equation is non-art, it is simply an entertaining therapy we all occasionally succumb to in the morass of capitalist consumerism, luckily temporarily, for an instant gratification).

So, especially those of you who are sensitive to arts, go to see this film. It is precisely for the sensitive, not for the McDonald-eating crowd.

And then go to visit Auschwitz. If you haven’t already, that is.

Maja Bogojević