The Academy got it wrong (again)

Rating: 4/10 (10 April 2016)

"Son of Saul" or "Saul fia" is a Hungarian film from last year that won big at Cannes and also took home the Golden Globe and Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. And in my opinion, the got it wrong again. "ida" was already a pretty weak winner last year and same goes for "Son of Saul". It looks to me as if people are appreciating this film because of the difficult and controversial subject. But this alone should not be enough. A film also has to tell a compelling story and this one does not I think. The film runs for slightly over 100 minutes and most of it, actually everything except the ending, takes place in a concentration camp. Another thing about this movie why it was so successful is that the ending is pretty memorable and dramatic and makes it easy to forget about the boredom from the previous 1.5 hours.
But I will not. The writer and director here is László Nemes and he is still pretty young, under 40, so we may hear a lot more from him in the future. i cannot say, however, that this film makes me curious about other projects from him. Lead actor is Géza Röhrig and he is completely new to acting it seems. Taking this into account, he did a pretty good job. I have read people say he should have been nominated for an Oscar, but I cannot agree with that. Still, it was a fairly convincing performance and he carried the film nicely from start to finish, given he was in pretty much every scene from start to finish. It is not his fault that the movie did not turn out so well. The problem is one that I just mentioned. Rührig is in every scene and the camera is always extremely close to him. I found this style of direction pretty unappealing, almost annoying at times. You can see the filmmaker's intention to let the audience perceive the action exactly like the protagonist does, but for me it did not work. This was a major turnoff for me here and I may have liked the film better with another approach by Nemes. But I have seen an older short film by him and it seems that he frequently takes this path. All in all, I do not recommend "Son of Saul". The protagonist's story was interesting only on a couple occasions, but not enough for such a long film and in terms of historic context we learn nothing here that we did not already know about concentration camps and WWII history if we have only very basic knowledge. Thumbs down.