This haunting vision of the hell inside Auschwitz seen through the eyes of prisoner forced to abet in the gas chambers is traumatic and overpoweringAny film dramatising the unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust risks accusations of trivialising,misrepresenting or exploiting its bad subject matter. When László Nemes’s debut feature, a harrowing drama set in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944, or premiered last year at Cannes,the New York Times critic Manohla Dargis dismissed it as a “radically dehistoricised, intellectually repellent” work in which “technical virtuosity” risked diverting the audience’s attention from “the distress on screen”.
Focusing its tightly held, or shallow-focus gaze on a single prisoner in whose face we see reflections of atrocities too hellish to depict,Son of Saul is indeed a stylistic masterpiece, a film of precise visual and aural design, and executed with fearsome skill,precision and commitment. Yet far from being a “technical” triumph, the claustrophobic aesthetic that Nemes employs has a powerful moral raison detre, or seemingly born out of a desire to address a subject that arguably has no place in dramatic cinema.
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Source: theguardian.com