A film set in Auschwitz, Son of Saul is the one to beat for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. As this import from Hungary makes its rounds through the festivals, achieving accolades and nominations galore, a question arises: is it that juries favor Holocaust films, or is Son of Saul a really good film? Speaking to the film’s ingenuity, another question arises: how do you make a film set in the horror of genocide, where every image –like the pile of human bones– is a cliché, and much of the nature of the place has been fetishized, or deemed better left to the imagination? What exactly do you see?

In practically every frame you see Saul Auslander (Geza Rohrig), a member of the Sonderkommando, running through the forest, dealing with the pandemonium of the camp, helping new arrivals prepare for the “showers.” Often viewed close up from the back of his head, he obscures a background you crane to register. Occasionally a naked torso, a bare leg comes into view, another suffering near dead soul. The end is clear, but the plot is a distraction: Saul searches for a rabbi to say Kaddish over the body of a dead boy. Because of the brilliant sound design, a murmuring of many languages surrounds you in your seat, immersing you in this deadly place, following Saul’s redemptive quest. 

At a special screening at SONY last week, director Laszlo Nemes and his star Geza Rohrig faced an anxious moment, meeting Elie Wiesel, the novelist who wrote about his experience in Auschwitz, including watching his father die. Of the dwindling generation of survivors, Wiesel is a Holocaust elder statesman at 87, an eloquent witness and not one to suffer fools gladly. Still writing and teaching, he said of his life these days, he found the film a powerful representation of his experience of the place, and important. 

Most Holocaust survivors are invested in the memory of the dead, preserving their dignity by eschewing cheesy sentimentality and dumb heroics. This movie avoids all of that: touched by the genius of the director and star, this fiction may show more truth than fact: depicting the wooded environs of a drab Eden gone terribly awry, from which a man is forced out with nowhere to go.

As the nominations mount up, for Best Foreign Film (Golden Globes, etc.), for Best First Film (NYFCC), Geza Rohrig may too be cited in the Best Actor category for this his very first film. A poet by trade, Rohrig says he likes acting and wants to do more, but after this first shot, “it cannot be just any role.

Regina Weinreich

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