recreating the holocaust, resurrecting God

Rating: 8/10 (4 February 2020)

Jean Luc Godard criticised film for having averted the holocaust in the 20th century. Whether or not director László Nemes heard this is remained to be known. Whatever the inspiration for this film, thank God the inspiration came. Ironically this is the central tenet of the film. God.
Nietzsche hailed the death of Gods toward the latter part of the 19th century. Scholars are happy to agree that this was in ways a conscious or not prediction of the atrocities that would fall upon mankind in the early 20th century.
The holocaust is and rightly so one of the topics and events most associated with the Nazis. The Son of Saul has ventured into this event with such bravery and humility that one would be forgiven for assuming that the film was a piece of lost footage. Salvaged from the pits of a grave. Aside from the colour of the film and the clear aesthetically driven shots at times, this movie is to the bone, so much that it feels like a documentary.
As students of the world we are taught about the death camps that the Nazi's created and occasionally are exposed to the footage filmed by journalists and soldiers who liberated camps. Liberated. The word seems so unjust. One of the many achievements of this film is that liberation, if possible, is not through the opening of gates, but through the opening of hearts. This is the story. This is Saul.
This film is a meditation on God or rather the death of God. Shown by the central plot device which sees the protagonist, Saul, desperately and unwaveringly seek a place of burial for a boy who has been murdered by a doctor. This man merely wants to recognise the humanity of this boy, which ultimately helps us meditate on perhaps this what religions point toward, us. The divinity of life is life itself. It's ironic that Judaism (one of the oldest extant religions) is the group which finds itself tested and scrutinised in the ghastliest manner by these self-proclaimed rulers of things. Ultimately one can't help but think Saul in burying this child is trying to resurrect God, to resurrect life in a place where he seems to have been abandoned.
The Nazi's have no God. Hitler placed at the zenith of the human psyche oversees morality. Like a new-born God, one gets the feeling from Son of Saul that Hitler recognised his reign would be mortal and hence his frenetic evil was a result of temporal cognisance.
Saul is part of the Sonderkommando, a group of Jewish prisoners who were enslaved by the Nazis. Forced to coerce other Jews into the gas chambers. More, they were forced to clear the bodies of their families, friends and fellow brothers and sisters from the chambers. In this we witness the industrialised nature of the Nazi killing machine. One may read about the intricacies of death camps like Auschwitz, Treblinka and Belzec but this film brings it to life, or rather, to death. Somehow the filmmakers have managed to squeeze the nauseous smells and claustrophobia through the lens onto the screen. It is in scenes like these where bodies are just pushed around like pieces of meat that we are faced to encounter what Nietzsche may have heralded.
This is not to suggest it was the filmmaker's intent, but one cannot escape it. We witness the screams of women and children who witness the executions of their naked neighbours only metres ahead. One is forced to find themselves appreciating that the reason as a society we may so often overlook this topic, genocide, is because it's too much to comprehend. The mind somehow protects itself from such evil in order so that it does not freeze via some vicarious PTSD. Son of Saul ignores this via breath-taking acting and filming. Whilst most of the characters are nameless, this fact adds humanity to them. It takes away one less layer of social abstractness so that we can empathise.
The cinematography by Matyas Erdely is wonderful. Often the peripheries of shots are out of focus which adds to the chaos of the place. It helps us focus on Saul's focus. Doing so without sacrificing the perpetual hell that occupants of death camps found themselves in.
As stated earlier, this film is a meditation on God. Often, we are forced to believe God is a man in the sky. László Nemes questions this and burrows the film beneath the allegorical veneer of religious stories and tries to reflect on the omniscience of God. That being, that God is immanent. God is us. It is up to us to create heaven, as we now know that it is us who creates hell.