At once awful and beautiful

Rating: 9/10 (28 February 2016)

The Sonderkommando, the "bearers of secrets," work between the living and the dead in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Saul Auslander is one among them. He carries bodies, washes blood from gas chamber floors and shepherds the living into flames. He is cold as death himself. Yet something snaps inside him and awakens his heart. Despite being gassed and discarded beneath a heap of bodies, a boy briefly clings to life. Saul, roused to some kind of higher purpose, attempts superhuman feats in order for a Kaddish, a proper funeral rite, to be performed so this boy might have eternal life.
At once awful and beautiful. The Holocaust is portrayed in an atypical manner that is up-close and revealing in all its terror and malevolence, yet at the same time the plot and characters are inscrutable and mysterious as the human heart. Camera angles heighten the intensity and impact of the film. The camera is often face to face with Saul. It follows him around the camp, as he collects belongings from the dead, into groves of poplars to attempt an escape and to the river to shovel away the ashes. The adept acting, editing, directing, story and scenes kept me on the edge of my seat during the length of the film. Winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes and at this very moment won an Oscar for best foreign language film.