Son of Saul

It's maybe appropriate that I watched this on the eve of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz camp. It follow the story of the Hungarian Jew "Saul" (Géza Rögrig) who is essentially a sort of prefect for the Nazis. His job is to usher the prisoners to their final shower, meal and thence to the gas chamber. Every now again they have to dispose of the ashes and disinfect the place, and it's a continuing process. Then he comes across the corpse of a young boy whom he reckons is his illegitimate son and determines to give him a decent burial. That's easier said than done as he must find a plot of ground, and a rabbi - and that's all whilst his fellow inmates either despise his perceived complicity with their captors or are more focused on arming themselves for a rebellion. What now ensues offers us a different take on the ghastly goings on inside this place of wholesale slaughter. The character of "Saul" like that of so many of his counterparts is living with the ever-present fear of death and the photography here takes us into the heart of this evil killing machine in a fashion that's potently graphic without being cinematically gruesome. The scenario is dark and muddy, grim and terrifying and yet this man becomes obsessed with inserting some sort of decency, of humanity, into this maelstrom of horror. There's a fine supporting cast that demonstrate well not just the claustrophobia of the camp, but the increasingly desperate attitudes in a place where dying free is infinitely preferable to what undoubtedly awaits them if they don't try to rise up. What's also quite interesting here is the portrayal of an hierarchy within the prisoners themselves. There's resentment of "Saul" but it's in a context of a lesser of two evils, and in the chaos of the denouement the sense of communality if not necessarily community is writ large by a director who knows how to let his pictures tell a story. It's not a pleasant watch, but it's an authentic looking one that rings true.