Hell on earth

Rating: 4/10 (2 August 2018)

I found this film almost as difficult to review as I did to watch. Surely no-one could imagine the horrors of trying to survive Auschwitz on a minute by minute never mind hourly or daily basis but this film puts you almost literally behind the eyes of one man in the camp as the camera only rarely changes perspective from his subjective viewpoint to a more objective position so that you effectively only see what he sees and experience what he experiences. Immediately you sense the dehumanization of the individual as he and his specially chosen fit and able fellow POW's perform the task of removing, burning and disposing of the remains of the hundreds of daily gas victims there. When he sees a young boy somehow survive the gassing only to be even more cruelly murdered by suffocation by the German doctor on the scene, he impulsively decides to appropriate the boy's corpse and have it consecrated by a rabbi.
Along the way he gets involved in a mass escape attempt by his fellow inmates but even then carries the boy's body with him as he moves.
As I said, the movie was excruciating to watch at times. Think of all the famous (or infamous) cultural or artistic depictions of hell by the likes of Dante, Hyronemus Bosch, Picasso, Goya and others and you're only part way there. The cacophonous background sounds, abrupt switching of perspectives and sometimes distorted speaking voices all combine to batter away at the viewer's senses so that on a sensory level, the movie succeeds if too well.
As others have said however, when you learn that the story itself is fictionalised, when there were thousands of separate stories which could have been told, for me weakened the whole premise. I suppose we must be grateful that there is almost no real footage of the atrocities the Nazis committed in these labour camps and it's beyond argument, especially with the worrying rise these days of Holocaust deniers, that the producers and director of this searing movie, that it shouldn't be depicted as harshly and realistically as here.
However, from a personal point of view, the combination of the relentless visual and audio attack on my senses together with that nagging doubt about the contrived nature of the main narrative in the end proved unsatisfactory to me. This subject is so vast and open to personal artistic interpretation that for some this hellish visualisation of events might be the best way to put across such an important message but as a movie viewer, I personally found it brutalising, numbing and much as I hate to say it repellent.