The Hungarian film ‘Son of Saul’ is a deserving winner of the official program of this year’s Zagreb Film Festival.
It is the best achievement at the Festival considering all categories, but also one of the most terrifying horrors ever made and, alongside ‘Schindler’s List’, although the concept of depicting the horrors of the Holocaust is completely different, the best feature film on that theme. It contains none of Spielberg’s pathos; tears and sorrow in the viewers are replaced by a feeling of anxiety, horror, and disgust towards everything that is human. The Sonderkommando, a unit of Jewish prisoners responsible for taking victims to the crematoria, whose members lived only a few months longer than other Jews, was a perfectly efficient workforce, and the film’s protagonists are brutal laborers of death. The only act that seems human in that hell, when Saul decides to bury at all costs the one he claims is his son, turns out to be a selfish and irrational move of a madman that thus destroys the plan for the Sonderkommando’s rebellion. László Nemes, whose debut this is, shoots with a handheld camera. In close-up, it is most often Saul, while the other protagonists and events are in the background, often only as outlines. Such an approach required that the sound conveys all the horrors of the camp, from the screams of burning people to the demonic orders of the Nazis.
