Son of Saul is an overwhelming, numbing, confusing experience by design. There’s no logic to it, but then reason has no place in such a nightmare. He now moves with purpose, his momentum focused on a goal that risks the success of a planned revolt within the camp. We can’t know what’s going through his mind, we can only observe his actions, and this new quest changes his bearing. Röhrig is not an actor by training-he’s a poet, a filmmaker, and a theologian-and he carries an almost impenetrable expression throughout the film. He is driven to give this boy a proper burial. It’s the first stranger he has let into his consciousness, that he even really sees, and it becomes his entire world. Barely alive, he is smothered by a doctor. When Saul sees a young boy-perhaps his son, perhaps a boy the same age-who somehow survived the gas chamber. It’s not just to keep us from seeing it clearly, but it suggests his own state of mind: detached out necessity, numb and exhausted, going through the motions of living, focused only on the activity. Everything else is blurred and indistinct if not completely out of frame, suggested more than seen.
![son of saul dvd son of saul dvd](http://www.videotheekmonroe.be/image/cover/16351/1?file=SonOfSaul.jpg)
Nemes shoots in a squarish format, similar to the pre-widescreen era of movies, with a short lens that keeps only Saul’s face and his immediate orbit in focus.
![son of saul dvd son of saul dvd](https://www.dvdizzy.com/images/s/sonofsaul-03.jpg)
We remain locked on Saul throughout the film. Rather Hungarian filmmaker László Nemes shoots it entirely in close-up, with a handheld camera uncomfortably close and constantly in motion as it follows Saul through the grind of his routine. Serving as a Sonderkommando didn’t save the men from death, it only postponed it, and Saul knows he hasn’t long.īut Son of Saul doesn’t linger on the horror. Saul (Géza Röhrig) is a Sonderkommando, chosen from the prisoners of a concentration camp to work in the gas chambers, and we are plunged into his crushing routine: moving the prisoners through the dressing rooms, sifting and sorting the belongings after they are locked in the gas chamber, then dragging the bodies out and clearing way for the next group. Son of Saul (Sony, Blu-ray, DVD, VOD) drops the viewer into the horror of the Holocaust with its first images.