What matters, to him and to us is that he is able to feel again. If he really had a son - but that is beside the point. Saul’s backstory is entirely missing from the film - we don’t even learn But then he witnesses a young boy briefly surviving the gas, only to be put to death a few minutes later by a Nazi doctor, possibly Josef Mengele.įrom this moment, he becomes consumed by the idea of giving the boy a proper Jewish burial. Repellent sense of his - and our own - indifference. In scene after scene we see his face unmoved, his eyes watching but remote there is a

The movie’s central theme is Saul’s inner world, the loss and recovery of his soul. The film is a thoroughly personal, subjective account of the Holocaust. By eliciting aįull, visceral engagement from the viewer, the film embodies the respect for the singular events of the Holocaust that more commercial treatments of the subject fail at. This seems to be a moral imperative as well as an aesthetic choice. In immersing the viewer this way, Nemes places us there with Saul. It is as though we are shadowing him in hell. By using close-ups and shallow focus images throughout, Nemes gives viewers no opportunity to disengage from Saul’s In long, unbroken shots, we see the reality of the death camp revealed, its textures made tangible. The film creates a direct, experiential and visceral engagement with these events by maintaining a relentless focus on the minute-to-minute unfolding of Saul’s It follows a day in the life of Saul, a member of the Sonderkommando, a group of mostly Jewish prisoners the Nazis forced to assist with herding people to the gas chambers, burning the bodiesĪnd collecting gold and valuables from the corpses. Written and directed by the Hungarian filmmaker László Nemes, “Son of Saul” won awards at Cannes, the Golden Globes and elsewhere before making its way to the Oscars to win the award for bestįoreign language film. It engages with a profound set of problems that also occupied the 19 th-century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. “Son of Saul ,”Ī film set in Auschwitz-Birkenau during the Holocaust, is such a work of art. But every now and then, a work of art - something other than a lecture or words on a page - can function as philosophy. The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.Īrt is often the subject of philosophy.

Son of saul movie times