László Nemes (LN): We wanted to convey something about the human experience within the concentration camp, to present an internal point of view, a human point of view, rather than having the usual external point of view that films operate with. Why was this immersive perspective important for you as a storyteller? What did you feel it had to offer that a more external point of view couldn’t?
(L-R) Director László Nemes and actor Géza RöhrigĬarlos Aguilar, MovieMaker Magazine: Son of Saul is shot with an unnerving immediacy guided by the protagonist’s facial expressions and his unwavering mission.
You could easily mistake it for the magnum opus of a celebrated auteur-yet it’s actually the work a new filmmaker (albeit a former assistant to master auteur Béla Tarr), one with sharp views on cinema today. Shot on 35mm in the 4:3 “Academy” aspect ratio, using a form of controlled chaos so apt for its nightmarish world, Son of Saul is a masterful achievement. The magnitude of such horror never feels exploited by Nemes, who instead presents events with a subtle straightforwardness that mirrors the desensitization necessary for surviving this rigorous, inhuman labor. In the face of his atrocious reality, what keeps Saul from losing all sense of purpose is his mission to bury a murdered young boy whom he believes to be his own son. Hungarian actor and writer Géza Röhrig transforms into Saul, a Jewish man in the Sonderkommando, a group of concentration camp prisoners selected by the Nazis to carry out the most abject tasks related to the gas chambers: disposing the victims’ bodies. The story forces audiences to, as much as possible, walk in the shoes of a man who was part of the Nazi killing machine. Throwing most of these notions out the window, Hungarian first-time director László Nemes devises a peculiarly organic film language for his Holocaust-set debut Son of Saul-in this writer’s opinion, the best film to open stateside this year-and by doing so, truly achieves that profound connection between viewer and protagonist that marks a slice of cinematic truth. Establishing shots, montages, stylized close-ups, all assembled in the editing room, contribute this formal cinematic grammar, eliciting a controlled emotional reaction. The typical means of achieving this, however, presents the story from an outside perspective, one that limits how close, visually or otherwise, we can get to the subjects on screen.
Comment To walk in someone else’s shoes and see the world through their eyes is, in many ways, what moviemakers want audiences to experience when they dedicate a couple hours to following a character’s narrative arc.