As Saul scrubs the gas chamber floor afterward, with naked corpses heaped like garden waste in his periphery, he never changes expression. Nemes follows this process in long, unbroken, elegantly choreographed shots that take in all the disorderly horror of a new batch of prisoners being herded into the camp, stripped in changing rooms, and slaughtered en masse. He helps herd new prisoners into the gas chambers, then searches their discarded clothes for valuables afterward, and obediently helps clean up the mess. Saul is one of the Sonderkommando, the concentration camp prisoners who temporarily escaped execution by assisting their captors. Nemes' film is confident and manifestly singular Everything outside his own survival becomes a blur, and the camera reflects and respects that.
As a trustee in Auschwitz, assisting with the systematic execution of thousands of other Jews like himself, he's had to narrow his world down to his immediate surroundings. For the most part, as the film progresses, only Saul and the things that become important to him are meaningfully in focus. But as the setting becomes clear in director László Nemes' shockingly brilliant debut, the ambition, intelligence, and emotional heft of that strange opening shot does too. It takes much longer for viewers to find their bearings in the chaos that immediately follows. The camera is handheld, but it still stands passively still for nearly two minutes, until protagonist Saul (Géza Röhrig) walks from the background to the foreground, and his grey face takes over the frame in ultra-sharp detail. Son Of Saul opens with an out-of-focus shot of an empty forest glade.
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