Whether the child belongs to Saul feels immaterial, in the same way that the details of an escape plot being hatched are muddied by the vision of hell set before us. Saul's doomed quest feels like a form of madness equal to the infinite number of other madnesses going on all around him.
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During the time we spend with Saul, as he works day and night, he becomes convinced that a dead child is his son and is determined to find a rabbi among the captives to help give this boy a proper burial. From there, Nemes launches into a frenetic journey around the camp, more interested in portraying a sense of acute horror and disturbing chaos via his stalking, up-close camerawork and haunting sound design, than in making the facts of his story clear. Wisely suggesting that there's nothing particularly special or heroic about Saul, whose blank expression suggests his soul has long since been crushed, Nemes's camera seems accidentally to find him as the film begins: Saul wanders from the distance into sharp focus (and into an almost-square, 1:33 ratio frame), like a moth to a flame.
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Set over 24 hours in 1944 and almost chaining itself to its lead character (so close does the camera stick to him) the film gives us Saul (Géza Röhrig), a member of the Sonderkommando – the unit of mostly Jewish prisoners forced to assist their captors with mass execution. A one-time assistant to the director Béla Tarr, 38-year-old Hungarian filmmaker László Nemes has made a staggering feature debut with 'Son of Saul', an Auschwitz-set drama that's numbing, provocative and impossible to unsee.