Son of Saul

Director: László Nemes
Writer: László Nemes, Clara Royer
Stars: Géza Röhrig, Levente Molnár, Urs Rechn 
Runtime: 107 minutes

Plot: In the horror of 1944 Auschwitz, a prisoner forced to burn the corpses of his own people finds moral survival upon trying to salvage from the flames the body of a boy he takes for his son.

Review: Saul Auslaender (Geza Rohrig) slowly walks into focus at the start of Son of Saul, but the camera will then rarely leave him until the end. In a long sequence shot without any dialogue, the Hungarian Saul is seen doing his Sonderkommando job in Auschwitz-Birkenau, where another large group of Jews is chaotically escorted to the changing rooms and then into the "showers." The second the doors of the gas chamber are closed, Saul robotically starts emptying all the clothes hooks on the wall, while the screaming and banging from within the chamber quickly reaches an unbearable level, though Saul hardly seems to notice, until one day when he discovers the corpse of a young boy he claims is his son.

Any first feature that manages to land directly in the competition in Cannes has done something right, and director Laszlo Nemes takes a well-known cinematic subject, the Nazi concentration camps, but distils his narrative to the story of just one man: the titular Saul.

Nemes's film is the winner of the Grand Prix at this year's Cannes Film Festival. The film features very few dialogues, instead relying on visuals and direct sound (there's no score) to advance the story. This augments the raw sense of urgency and directness of a lot of the action. It pushes its vision to the bitter end, eschewing emotion, reflection, or intellectual framing as if banned at gunpoint from any such lapses.

Reviewed by Intisab Shahriyar