Critics reviews

Son of Saul, the extraordinary debut by Laszlo Nemes, dares to depict the "implacable nakedness of the violence" (as Lanzmann called it), and does so to devastating effect.

It has sometimes been suggested that there's little more to be said, in cinematic terms, about the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust, that it has been churned over too often. The single-minded power and visceral immediacy of Nemes' achievement, rightly acclaimed and awarded, prove otherwise.

The sense and significance of images is not simply given or self-evident, even in the case of photographs. Any meaning they harbor depends on the viewer's willingness to see and bear it. Son of Saul remains an undecidable film, and there is no guarantee that it has avoided the moral risks inherent in its project. Its true achievement is its capturing and projecting images that call for real imaginative and ethical work.

For me, I think Son Of Saul tries a little too hard, its mechanism too obvious, and the film can also feel like a manipulative pummeling. There's no denying that this is a masterclass of tight, precise filmmaking, with every shot technically composed to achieve the overwhelming effect of horror, from the near-stampede at the mass graves, the howling victims horded into the chambers. But if Son Of Saul wanted us to find a faint glimpse of humanity in what looks and feels like hell, we didn't.

Son of Saul's achievement is to scrape away our benumbed awareness of the Final Solution in the abstract. More chilling than any epic restaging or recitation of statistics, in the movie's context, is a guard placating a chamber-bound prisoner with a tossed-off reassurance: "After the shower, you'll have tea." In that sentence, the banality of evil is distilled.

The most exciting new film I've seen over the past year... Seeing the film as a Jew who knew about the Sonderkommando (and who regarded their job and fate as the very worst of all the Nazis' crimes) but who'd never been forced to identify with them, I found myself sharing Saul's panic and predicament, and that response becomes part of the meaning and significance of the parable.

By adhering to its protagonist's subjectivity, it pretends to keep its horrors largely off-camera, always implying that its aesthetic approach is The Right One. We are invited to find it proper, even tasteful, because we hear rather than see murder, or because images of humans being shot in the head and dropped into pits are kept out of focus. It's not a cinema of ideas, but one of rigidity, constructed entirely of an arbitrary set of moral principles.

Nemes isn't just re-creating unspeakable sadness but electrifying it with a kind of somber energy. For all its intensity, Son of Saul is never ponderous. It moves so quickly, and relies so little on dialogue, that you need to race a little to keep up with it, and to keep your eyes open every second.

Son of Saul is most valuable for its attention to the themes and ideas in Lanzmann's work. Nemes admirably re-instigates discussion of the awe-inspiring, complex, and yet unassimilated experience of Lanzmann's films—and does so perhaps even more discerningly than much written criticism does. Yet without "Shoah" "Son of Saul" Would be meaningless; in the light of "Shoah," "Son of Saul"—though useful and provocative—is, nonetheless, nearly superfluous.

My friend and colleague Manohla Dargis angrily condemned this film as "radically dehistoricized" and while the characterization is correct I kind of think that a form of dehistoricization was part of director László Nemes' point. His demonic conception and execution of his Holocaust story, holding claustrophobically tight on his doomed lead character, removes the viewer from the realm of historical contemplation and into the realm of experiential phenomenology.

No spoiler here, but I must point out that Nemes brilliantly ties the two principal narratives together. The dual story lines coexist. The film is hardly optimistic, but the one thing this gifted filmmaker grants us at the point of convergence is surprising closure that is an inspired game changer.

The filmmaker's goal isn't a sensitively lit, emotive drama, with wide views that might suggest a sense of comprehension that feels unrealistic in the living death of camp existence; indeed, its biggest weakness lies in the workmanlike screenplay, packed and punctual... Technically, Son of Saul is a bravura feat, especially its wrenchingly detailed and textured sound design, truly evoking a factory of death.