Son of Saul

**Son of Saul: Horror Up Close**

October 1944, Auschwitz extermination camp. A man walks through the smoke of the crematoria, indifferent to the chaos surrounding him. He is not a soldier, nor an ordinary prisoner: he is Saùl Ausländer, a member of the *Sonderkommando*, the Jews forced to collaborate in the Nazi machinery. His mission is to erase evidence, but that morning something changes. Among the corpses, he believes he recognizes his son. And he decides on the impossible: to give him a dignified burial.

This is how *Son of Saul* (2015) begins, the debut film of László Nemes that shook the Holocaust film genre. There is no grandeur, no epic music, no panoramic shots. The Hungarian director chooses intimacy: the camera stuck to Saùl's neck, the muffled sound of screams, the out-of-focus that forces us to look only at what he sees. It's uncomfortable, claustrophobic, but necessary. Because horror cannot be explained; it must be lived.

It won the Oscar for Best International Film, and it was no coincidence. Nemes breaks with conventional storytelling: here there are no heroes, no redemption, no easy moral lessons. Only an obsessed man, crawling through death, with a question that hurts more than bullets: what remains of humanity when the world has become a slaughterhouse? The answer is not in the dialogues — scarce, brutal —, but in the silence. In Geza Röhrig's gesture, the actor who brings Saùl to life with a restraint that burns.

It's not a film to watch, it's a film to endure. And that, in a genre saturated with good intentions, makes it unique.

Impressive and heartbreaking, 'Son of Saul' puts you in the eye of the Nazi hurricane.

" Where is the exit? — Saùl