A great contribution to the Holocaust genre

Rating: 7/10 (24 July 2018)

Two days are chronicled in the life of Saul Auslander (Geza Rohrig), a Hungarian Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz in 1944.
Saul is a Sonderkommando member of the concentration camp. His own life is temporarily spared and he gets better benefits than other prisoners but he and his fellow Sonderkommandos must do some of the worst work that the Nazis don't want to do. (I'm being deliberately vague to avoid spoilers.) Early in the film, Saul personally takes on a mission that involves a religious ritual and the search for a rabbi.
The uniqueness of the directing style by Laszlo Nemes is highly praiseworthy. The camera is either on Saul in close-up or following behind him as the viewer sees what he sees while the background is out of focus. The atrocities seen in the background would have been the main dramatic focus of other films. Here, the viewer is taken to see that the horror is treated as a day-to-day work routine with much activity happening as the prisoners must be visibly busy to avoid the wrath of their slave-drivers. Thus, the casualness magnifies the horror.
Rohrig also deserves praise for being in every scene and mostly in close-up at that. He does a fine job in conveying Saul's intensely desperate life while surrounded by insanity.
There is much to admire about "Son of Saul" but it becomes difficult to understand why Saul is so relentless in his pursuit of his goal even though he jeopardizes himself and his fellow prisoners. Even if there was the slightest comment or hint to get closer to his motives, this could have made a good film into a great one. Some explanations include the possibility of insanity. While this may be true, the ambiguity becomes more frustrating than fascinating.
It is easy to compare "Son of Saul" to other related Holocaust films that reach a higher mark:

"Phoenix ", a German film also released in 2014;
"Fateless", another Hungarian Holocaust drama that was released in 2005;
"Kapo", an Italian film released in 1960. Like "Son of Saul", this film took on the difficult subject of concentration camp prisoners who turn against their own in order to alleviate their own personal circumstances. It dug deeply into the pain of conscience in such harrowing circumstances.