Son of Saul

Just as strongly as the opening half-hour impressed me, I was (except for the very end) put off by the following hour, drawn out and full of situations that seemed, by and large, too far-fetched. Of course, I don't know how things were in the extermination camps, and it's quite possible that such things could have happened there, but the constant moving of the body, the moving from one ward to another, the excuses... It was a bit too fantastic for my taste and the realistic concept was just too much. Despite all the criticisms (one of which would be directed at the creators of the Czech subtitles, who God knows why, didn't translate everything and I had the feeling that I missed something important, because I can only say segedýn in Hungarian), I can't deny the film's absolutely fantastic processing, the idea "Let's make the viewer feel like the main character.", the repulsively impressive cinematography, and the excellently done sound, which simply cannot be the same at home in front of the computer or TV as in a cinema full of unsettled people. If I ever get the courage, I'll watch it again. But now I'd rather have another comedy, please. (24/02/2016)

The interesting style of camerawork strongly reminded me of Resident Evil 4. I also liked the sound, which had a very intense effect on me, perhaps in connection with the camera. Otherwise, I was quite disappointed. Initially, the film felt very realistic to me. But the next thing I know, I'm watching the Sonderkommando in full action while the lead is standing in the middle of the room, staring blankly, and nothing’s happening. I was just waiting for one of the guards to go get him a coffee and a cigarette. Compared to similar films, it definitely loses out to The Grey Zone. (21/06/2016)

A very authentical portrayal of the hell of a concentration camp that focuses on the Sonderkommando, auxiliary Jews who send other Jews to the gas chambers and also to the ovens. What annoyed me was the main character, as the camera took close-ups of his face quite often and he wasn't a very pretty sight to look at, which might still be passable if he didn't also annoy me with his behaviour, as he spends the whole film looking for a rabbi and wanting to bury his son, and that didn't sit right with me as the central plot. If the film had focused more on the riot or shown footage of the gas chambers or the ovens, it could have been a competition to A Serbian Film. Still, this is a disturbing film from a horrific setting and I don't envy anyone who had to endure it. The unconventional cinematography is interesting. Decent, but I could imagine it being better.70% (11/09/2018)

I quite enjoyed the inner conflict of the main character in the first half because I actually experienced it too. I wondered for a long time if it was rational to devote my energy to a dead child in such moving circumstances ("because of the dead you forgot about the living"), only to realize later that the central character often really doesn't give a damn about any rationality. Son of Saul is an extremely intimate portrait of a broken man for whom the self-destructive and quite obviously irrational (given the situation) need for a ritualistic act becomes the only life purpose. The extremely evocative POV cinematography and (thankfully) mostly out-of-focus shots of human carnage are quite disturbing, and the atmosphere of pervasive evil and death radiates from the screen in a way that's not pretty. [80%] (29/11/2020)

The wiping of vomit and blood and the removal of fresh corpses from the just-used gas chamber, the precisely organized loading of those corpses into furnaces, the constant dumping of ashes into the river; people reduced to mere numerical units, "pieces", worthless waste – killing as a manufacturing process. Killing as a perfectly lubricated and thought-out machine, whose puppets and operators in one – sonderkommando – have prolonged their lives by at least a few months, and who carry the corpses with complacency, without emotions and emotional outpourings (what else is left for them), as if they were operating a machine tool. And in that darkness of inhumanity and filth, like a faint glimmer of humanity, there’s the desire of one of the sonderkommando to bury – as civilized society should – one dead boy. A film that everyone should watch. Especially the fucked up Nazi dumbasses, who I'm under no illusions would be moved, but if even just one in a thousand said to themselves "God, what an asshole I am!", this movie would make sense. Only an idiot can "get bored" or "fall asleep", as I have read here a few times, with this overwhelming experience. (29/02/2016)