Defies expectations in a very good way

Rating: 8/10 (8 April 2016)

This film is very special for the Hungarian audience, and for a good reason. Not very recently we had a liberal government with palpable Israeli influence on local politics. (Most notably, Israeli soldiers dressed as Hungarian cops and firing rubber bullets at peaceful people on the streets on 23 October 2006, on the 50th anniversary of the 1956 revolution.) This government and their Israeli friends did everything to push the Holocaust down the throat of Hungarians and force them to admit their responsibility for it. Hungarians didn't take it well. All they achieved was to convince an entire generation that the Holocaust is a propaganda tool in Israeli politics and the leftist agenda. This movie was not received with too much awe in Hungary. It is viewed as another propaganda piece about a falsely represented historic event. I can't remember any of my friends ever watching it, but I also can't name anyone who hasn't despised it without seeing.
They are wrong. This movie is good. Even if it's just a work of fantasy. It is largely based on the memoirs of Miklós Nyiszli, a Jewish doctor who claimed to have worked for Dr. Joseph Mengele in Auschwitz. His account was the first ever published about the death camp in the 1940s-- and the first to be debunked by historians. Nowadays it's widely accepted to be plain forgery. Nevertheless Holocaust propagandists keep reprinting his story as "authentic".
But this won't make it a bad movie. We all love Star Wars, Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad and many more which we also know are not true. Still we feel for its characters and genuinely feel for them. There are many WW2 movies which take place in a historic environment, in battles fought in reality but with fictional characters. Why hate a work of fantasy which takes place in a fictional death camp?
And for that, it's brilliantly made. It truly deserved an Oscar. The novel and unique approach to the protagonist's perspective is unlike I've ever seen. It plays brilliantly with light, sound and emotions. We know it didn't happen this way. Saul Auslander did not exist, his story is not more true than Bambi. Still, death camps did exist. Not this, and not this way, but something very similar did. What if Saul was a German POW in a Siberian death camp? Or if he was a Chinese in a Japanese camp? Or a prisoner today in North Korea's camps?
Definitely not a piece of propaganda. A nicely made movie about humanity. Or well, not so "nicely" - the entire movie is deliberately bleak and unpleasant. I loved it.