All this takes place in rigorously organised long takes that must have caused logistical nightmares. (We get no discussion of the Sonderkommandos’ reasoning in taking those roles, incidentally.) The decision to shoot on narrow Academy ratio adds further claustrophobia to the mayhem. While Saul fights to regain the tiniest semblance of moral balance, dripping bodies are being hefted on to lifts and inmates are being shot perfunctorily through the head. The awful matter-of-fact nature of the killing is heightened by its frequent relegation to soft-focus background. In the style of the Dardenne brothers, the camera bounces ahead of Saul and then allows itself to be caught up and passed out. It is the breathless dynamics of Son of Saul that really sets it apart. While he is bribing prisoners with stolen jewellery, a rising is brewing that may save some skins until the Allies arrive. The movie is filled with looming closeups of Saul as he looks off-screen at horrors that defy comprehension similar closeups of the back of his head suggest a similar gaze at the very events that.

It follows our protagonist, Saul (portrayed with great nuance and facial acting skill by first time actor Géza Röhrig), over the course of two chaotic days in Auschwitz as the camp nears its liberation. Saul appears to recognise him as his own son and sets out to find a Rabbi to say the Kaddish over his body. Debut filmmaker László Nemes’ Son of Saul is, by a fair margin, the best film that I saw at the 2015 Cannes International Film Festival. Gza Rhrig’s performance is an extraordinary feat of minimalism. One boy survives the gas chamber, but is subsequently killed by a German officer. Movie review of Son of Saul: This Oscar nominee for best foreign-language film takes us into the heart of the Holocaust. We begin with disciplined atrocity as Saul (Géza Röhrig), one of those camp inmates who turned coats for small mercies, assists in the murder of a new batch of prisoners. Nemes’s mobile camera, taste for long takes and decision to cast atrocities into the background recalls, more than Tarr, Ellen Klimov’s great Come and See. Nobody, however, can doubt the cinematic talent on display. Those who cherish Theodor Adorno’s notion that there is “No poetry after Auschwitz” will have understandable worries about the picture. Though Nemes has worked with the famously somnambular Bela Tarr, his first feature turns out to have the rampaging momentum of an action thriller.

It has been some time since a debut feature in the main competition at Cannes registered with the same power as László Nemes’s breathtaking study of a tormented Sonderkommando during the last days of Auschwitz.

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