The God in the Machine - the horrible, horrible machine

Rating: 9/10 (16 June 2016)

I recently read in Slavoj iek's new book "Against the Double Blackmail" that there once was a Jewish Holocaust survivor who, seemingly overcoming the trauma of Auschwitz, continued living his life, got a good education, a well- paying job, became a respected part of his community and a good provider for his family. However, when interviewed by a journalist, he bluntly admitted that he hated all Arabs. No reason for it really, he just couldn't stand them - all of them! Shocked by this statement, the journalist told a friend about her curious interviewee: "How can someone who was subjected to the horrific system of the concentration camps because of his Jewish religion, echo the Nazi's dogma of hating an entire group of people because of their ethnicity?" To which her friend answered: "Well, what did you expect! Auschwitz was not a place where people went to learn anything, especially anything about humanity or tolerance."
We have to acknowledge more than that absolutely nothing good came from the Holocaust: it's effect on everyone was only bad. Not that everyone involved, including the victims, broke bad, but that it creates the opposite of what you need to become a better person. And we see in Son of Saul the prisoners of Auschwitz on the verge of hopelessness and zombiedom, and especially in Saul's case, on the verge of madness. But this is not the real Holocaust, this is a movie. Movies are about the human spirit, and just like The Pianist, Schindler's List and La vita è bella, this film shows us the human spirit overcoming the human spirit-destroying machine that was the Holocaust. Notice Saul and the comfort he finds in the (usually) traumatic act of seeing his dead son. (It is not his real son, however, just a dead body he is projecting his hopes onto.) Notice the rabbi attempting suicide immediately after Saul reminding him of a religious verse. How do you hold on to your humanity when that is exactly what will break you, given the circumstances are horrific enough?
How broken do you have to be when burying your son is the highlight of your existence? How dangerous is hope in this situation? Saul's fellow prisoner accuses him of caring more about the dead than the living, but when your day- job is cleaning an Auschwitz gas chamber, can you really afford either hope or to care about anyone, even yourself?
We see this world through Saul's perspective, who is not able to look directly at the horrors around him, hence the bodies are out of focus, and Saul's back is filling parts of the screen for most of the film. This brilliant and claustrophobic camera technique respects the dead by not using them simply as a gory shock-effect, yet at the same time making the shock even more horrible by forcing the audience to exercise their own imagination, and giving them the nightmare of realizing: "does light-brown out-of-focus blobs in the back of the elevator are human bodies!" Escaping Saul's point of view to look at him from the other prisoner's perspective, we realize how damaged he is himself. What do you think about your fellow prisoner who has kidnapped a dead boy, keeps him in his bed, and carries it with him when you escape?
By the end, when Saul and his fellow prisoners successfully escape the camp and are on the run, he loses his son when trying to cross a river. Notice that even though he is outside the walls, outside the industrial meat grinder were we have seen him at work, his only thought is still just "how can I bury my son." You are not healed by escaping, or even by the idea or hope of escaping, you need to find a new spirit. After his son is lost, the prisoners take a quick rest in an abandoned barn, where Saul finally meets his salvation. A boy stands in the doorway, looking at him. Saul smiles, he has found a living son (this is not his real son either of course)! He cares about the living again, and his arc is finally finished. This boy is a Deux ex Machina, but it works in a film like this. We accept the one good thing that happen throughout the entire movie, even if it is magical, because the Diabolus ex Machina that is Auschwitz is too powerful for a single human being to fight against anyway, especially when a minute later he and his fellow prisoners are found in the barn and murdered.
And unlike the Arab-hater in the beginning of this review, Saul's humanity is strong enough to accept all races. The first son is Jewish, and the second son is German. Saul does not care that the boy is the son of his enemies. His hope can go on living in this pure child, whoever he is, because the boy represents a new age for Germany. The boy, who has just witnessed the nightmare of the industrial Holocaust first hand, runs through the trees and back into nature, ready to amend his country.