It is a theatre of pure evil, all but unwatchable.
#Son of saul awards movie#
Son of Saul is a movie that requires attention and patience, with a script from Nemes and Clara Royer that’s often wordless or whispered. And the awful truth is the presence of the Sonderkommando, helping to superintend this business and to hoodwink and reassure. Right away, we know we’re in the hands of a director who wants to tell the story of the Holocaust from a different perspective than we’ve seen before in films: a more personal, intimate one. Prisoners are stripped and herded as if part of an industrial process of evil: the Nazi officers are all the time tricking and pacifying them with nonsense about how they are to be fed, clothed and used as craftsmen. Nemes’s film allows us to grasp only belatedly that this is what is happening – we glimpse it at the edge of the frame which is largely dominated by Saul’s face. One of the most devastating and deeply shocking aspects of Son of Saul is that it begins with a gas chamber scene another film might have opted to end with this kind of scenario, or to finish just before showing it. The gimmick, or what makes this film stand out from the many others on the same subject is this: It also has the severity of Béla Tarr, to whom Nemes was for two years an assistant, but without Tarr’s glacial pace: Nemes is concerned at some level with exerting a conventional sort of narrative grip which does not interest Tarr. Director László Nemes’s film has the power of Elem Klimov’s Come and See – which surely inspired its final sequence – and perhaps of Lajos Koltai’s Fateless.
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There is an argument that any such work, however serious its moral intentions, risks looking obtuse or diminishing its subject, although this is not a charge that can be levelled at Son of Saul.īy any standards, this would be an outstanding film, but for a debut it is remarkable.
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Peter Bradshaw at the Guardian writes:Ī season in hell is what this devastating and terrifying film offers – as well as an occasion for meditating on representations of the Holocaust, on Wittgenstein’s dictum about matters whereof we cannot speak, and on whether these unimaginable and unthinkable horrors can or even should be made imaginable and thinkable in a drama. But it’s worth noting when a film hits like this. It’s hard to guess how this jury will vote as each one is a different combination of sensibilities. Though I’ve not yet seen the film, it’s all the talk of Cannes that it could be in contention for the Palme d’Or.