Brings Home the Waking Nightmare That Was Life in a Concentration Camp

Rating: 9/10 (17 May 2016)

The sheer and utter depression of the Holocaust was not fully brought home to me until I read William Styron's "Sophie's Choice." Up to then, I had recognized the horror of it, the disbelief that humanity could sink to such depraved levels, the anger and sorrow inspired by stories of the victims. But more than anything while reading Styron's book, I was struck by how demoralizing the Holocaust was. It just may be the most singularly depressing event in human history, and what brought it home in that particular book is that Styron elaborated on the mechanization of it. These mass murders weren't being carried out in moments of anger, they weren't personal, they weren't the sick fantasy of one insane person's fevered brain. They were industrialized to the point that the humans being cycled through the camps were no different than cattle, and the people working the camps didn't think of them as anything different.
"Son of Saul" is the first film about the Holocaust I've seen that captures that same sense of hopeless depression I found in Styron's book. The camera sticks close to the film's protagonist, Saul, as he wanders through the waking nightmare that is life inside the prison camps, numb to the human carnage that takes place around him as he persists in his singular obsession with finding a rabbi to bless the dead young boy he has convinced himself is his son and give him a proper burial. The futility of Saul's task asks the audience to consider: Is it a noble gesture of humanity to be respected, one small attempt to retain a grip on humanity in the absence of anything resembling it; or is it a selfish, self-centered obsession with the impractical when Saul could have been providing real assistance to the living who needed it? The film doesn't make judgements, and I certainly found as a viewer that I couldn't either. How on earth could anyone who hasn't himself lived through the same thing even begin to think he would know how he would act in a similar situation? Unlike the most high profile and famous films about the Holocaust ("Schindler's List," "The Pianist"), "Son of Saul" doesn't even attempt to find a strain of hope or redemption in this story. It acknowledges what other artists who have tackled the Holocaust can't seem to bring themselves to admit, which is that there isn't even the slightest fragment of a happy ending to be found in an unspeakable moment of human history. I know why other artists can't acknowledge this -- it makes the senseless pain and human waste even that much more unbearable to contemplate. But it feels much more honest than those other films.
This is a tough but excellent movie.
Grade: A