Too much of everything

Excellent adaptation.

Absolutely the worst movie.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

I'll keep this short: Another rewiever wrote this film was about "what a man will do when he goes insane". That just hit me like a hammer, as it is exactly the other way around. This is not a film where a man goes insane. This is a film where one man is the only sane person in a world filled with insane and inhuman people. This is the purpose of the film. This is it's drive. All he tries to do in a world that has completely collapsed is to do one final act from the normal world that once were.This is so much better than all hero movies ever made. Saul is just a glimpse of normallity in a world that just gave up humanity in all senses.

I won't spend too much time on this review other than to say that, with an IMDb rating of 7.5, I expected a much better movie.I quite understand why the director invested so much time and effort in trying to engage the viewer in the main character's view of the atrocity that must have been life in one of the Germans' extermination camps during WWII. The message was conveyed loud and clear that survival for Saul and those like him was a minute by minute matter. Alive this minute and with a bullet in the brain the next if he even looked at one of the SS Officers or guards.Having said that I understand the reasons for trying to engage the audience by use of very unusual cinematography, I must say that I found the idea of looking at the back of Saul's head for almost the entire length of the movie, with everything else around him being thrown out of focus was, after about ten minutes, not only distracting but also extremely annoying. Of course there's a morbid fascination even these days at what the Nazis did during WWII, and it is true that we've seen similar movies made many times over the years. But rarely has a movie on this subject been so annoying and ultimately unsatisfying.I wanted to like this movie "Son Of Saul" but I just couldn't forgive it the infuriating lack of focus on the events that were going on around Saul, rather than on the back of his head and its small and insignificant place in the camp.JMV

It made me think of "Schindler's List"(1993) but this "Son of Saul"(2015) is different. It's as good as Spielberg's film, maybe even better. Love for your own child, even dead, makes you do unusual things, to defy death that awaits for you anyway, inside or off the concentration camp. A film excellently played, filmed, directed.

The debut feature film from Hungarian filmmaker László Nemes, SON OF SAUL wins Oscar's BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE PICTURE in 2016, it is a hard-nosed Holocaust drama takes a unique focal point of one particular Sonderkommando (Nazi's death camp inmates who are chosen to dispense with gas chamber victims), the Jewish-Hungarian Saul Ausländer (Röhrig, sometimes feels stilted but overall quite an endeavor from a non-professional).From the word go, Nemes' discreet modality of entirely putting Saul at the center stage grandly comes home to the audience, starting from an out of focus shot slowly clings to its object Saul, our visual cynosure, then meticulously follows his steps (a back-of-his-head vantage point) and only shows us what is happening strictly from his prospect, it is an intriguing and contained ploy, on one hand, the film waives a holistic view of the happenings, for fear that the uncompromising atrocity it scrupulously re-enacts is too much for viewers to bear, thus mercifully we are only presented with glimpses through Saul's constant movement, who seems to be strung-out yet benumbed, most of the time, he keeps to himself; on the other hand, the skimpy scenes are no less soul-stirring, the gas chamber, piles of naked cadavers, incinerators, dumping truckloads of ashes, the rampant slaughter, the whole package is there (a sterling job for its production designer, the Hungarian architect László Rajk Jr.), selectively materializes predicated upon Saul's presence, one indubitable merit of Nemes' picture is it has miraculously re-created a reliving the horror experience that possibly errs on the side of being so vicarious that one is instinctively repelled and tries to turn away from it. That is an inextricable dilemma of any film, cinema aims to engross, however, when the subject it depicts is inherently repugnant and horrendous to a fault, as a result we are often mired between these two disparate states, a self-inflicted masochism. Is there any redeeming grace to temper the milieu's inhuman brutality and its overlaying smothering? Yes, there must be, it is Saul's spur-of-the-moment decision to carry out a proper Jewish burial for a boy who dies after barely surviving the gas chamber and whom he claims to fellow inmates is his son (is it true? the answer is deliberately moot, but one inclines to nay, which makes Saul's action more perverse and improbable, maybe he thinks the boy's ephemeral survival is a numinous call for his action), so the imperative mission for him is to find a rabbi to officiate the burial, meantime, chivvied by Abraham (Molnár), another Sonderkommand, he is also embroiled into an impending uprising as their last attempt to scupper their imminent doomsday, but Saul is halfhearted. Granted that Saul's intransigency gravely compromises his contribution to the nobler/righteous cause (to an extent that he will lose those precious smuggled gun powders, and volunteer his own demise just to find a rabbi during the infernal pandemonium), the film perilously threats to negate its own raison d'être, which is to retain an infinitesimal trace of faith and courage to survive under such egregious monstrosities in the manifestation of defiance, Jews are being decimated, but their culture and rituals are deathless. In the end of the day, Saul's effort is futile, the rabbi he rescues is a sham, the body fails to be pushing up the daisies and when the camera finally veers from Saul after his hard-earned smile, what manifests is not a glint of hope but a consolation or a surrender only too soon will be rendered insignificant, ambiguity again takes an upper hand in this harrowing exploitation of the Holocaust, for all its calculated aesthetics, its impact is confounding and its laurels are undue.