11/9/2022 0 Comments Son of saul film review![]() ![]() (Towards the end of the film, another prisoner questions whether Saul-who’s perhaps not in his right mind-even had a son in the first place.) Another enduring mystery pertains to the female prisoner (Juli Jakab) who smuggles explosive powder to the Sonderkommandos: How does she know Saul’s name, and why does he pull away his hand when she tries to touch him? By revealing so little about Saul’s past, the film implies that life in the camp has stripped him of his individuality, reducing him to a mere cog in the machinery of genocide. ![]() Saul (Géza Röhrig) can’t be sure himself if the boy he finds still breathing in the gas chamber is actually his son, as he never locates the child’s identity card, nor is he able to determine if the transport on which he arrived came from Hungary. Conversely, in this movie the camera sticks to the protagonist like glue, severely restricting the range of knowledge we have access to, and the laconic exposition raises more questions than it answers. Of the two films, Nelson’s is the more classical as its narration is both omniscient (in order to accommodate the large ensemble cast) and highly communicative. But while they share essentially the same subject matter, the experience of watching each movie is fundamentally different: Nelson’s film is talky and philosophical, whereas Nemes’ is terse and visceral, the kind of movie you feel in your bones. As in Tim Blake Nelson’s The Grey Zone (2001), the central character is spurred to action when he discovers a child who’s survived the gas chamber, and the film ends with an uprising like those which occurred at Treblinka and Sobibór in 1943 and Auschwitz in 1944. ![]() László Nemes’ Son of Saul (2015) is the second movie I’ve seen specifically about the Sonderkommandos-units of Jewish prisoners in the concentration camps tasked with leading people into the gas chambers, pinching their valuables, and disposing of the bodies. The Man Who Loved Children: László Nemes’ Son of Saulīy Michael Sooriyakumaran Volume 19, Issue 12 / December 2015 5 minutes (1133 words) ![]()
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