In the early chaotic moments of the movie, Saul, his character, sees a miracle: A young boy, gasping for breath, has somehow survived the gas chamber. Röhrig, 48, a Brooklyn-based poet and scholar who owns up to a college-age intensification of his interest in the Holocaust (he later decided to become Hasidic), has spent years researching the specifics of a role that he had no idea was coming. When people got out of the cattle cars and saw Jewish faces running around, they thought, This couldn’t be that bad.” “Hunters put these seemingly realistic plastic ducks on the bay, so the real ducks think it’s safe. Meeting Nemes and his leading actor, Géza Röhrig, in midtown’s Sony headquarters (pumping Adele 24/7 in the lobby), I saw that the irony was not lost on them that a huge corporation will be the delivery device for their deeply personal movie.Įven more provocative is Son of Saul’s specific window into the horrors of Auschwitz: the routines of the controversial Sonderkommandos, Jews recruited against their will to assist with the burning and disposal of human remains, until it was their turn to die.“My analogy is that they were like the decoy ducks,” says Röhrig about his character’s unnatural status. He stresses out about the godlike perspectives that could only be from the points of view of SS guards. Nemes, boyish but already a veteran of the severe work ethic of his native Hungary’s Béla Tarr (he served as an assistant until they had a falling out), worries about cinema’s tendency to prettify. “The Holocaust has become abstract as a word-we tried to put a face on it.” “This was a human experience, and that’s something we tend to forget,” adds Nemes. There’s no lush cinematography, no Schindler’s List red dress, just the relentless experience of a single prisoner on whose shoulder we all but hang. “We had a set of principles, and one of them was not to make a beautiful film,” says director László Nemes, 38, whose staggering first feature, Son of Saul, plunges the viewer into a plank-for-plank reconstruction of the Nazi death camp during one day’s activity.

Even as cinema’s most inspired filmmakers- Steven Spielberg, Roman Polanski, Claude Lanzmann (director of the mighty 10-hour 1985 documentary Shoah)-take on the subject of the Holocaust, there’s a fear that with every movie, no matter how sentimental, we get further away from the truth. Auschwitz will always loom over the collective memory of the 20th century and, if we’re smart, beyond it.

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