Shot (and shown in Cannes) on 35mm, often in sickly greens and yellows and with deep shadows, Erdely’s cinematography is one of the film’s major assets, but it wouldn’t be half as effective without the soundwork, which plays a major role in suggesting what is happening around Saul, with audiences often forced to rely on the sound to imagine the whole, horrible picture. The almost square aspect ratio already doesn’t leave much room for any background to appear but since everything is filmed in shallow focus, what little surroundings are present in the frame are more suggested than clearly visible. What helps to make the experience much more visceral and direct than more classically staged Holocaust films is Nemes and co-screenwriter Clara Royer’s narrowly focused story and the ditto camerawork from Matyas Erdely, who stays glued to the protagonist in all but a handful of shots, while almost blocking out almost everything else. In a long sequence shot without any dialogue, the Hungarian Saul is seen doing his Sonderkommando job in Auschwitz-Birkenau, where another large group of Jews is chaotically escorted to the changing rooms and then into the “showers.” The second the doors of the gas chamber are closed, Saul robotically starts emptying all the clothes hooks on the wall, while the screaming and banging from within the chamber quickly reaches an unbearable level, though Saul hardly seems to notice. Saul Auslaender ( Geza Rohrig, a Hungarian poet and occasional actor) slowly walks into focus at the start of Son of Saul, but the camera will then rarely leave him until the end. It also seems like a shoo-in for Hungary’s Foreign-Language Oscar submission for next year. High-end arthouse distributors on both sides of the Atlantic will want to consider adding this to their lineup, especially if it takes home a Cannes award or two. Utterly uneasy to watch but strikingly and confidently assembled, the film is a powerful aural and visual experience that doesn’t quite manage to sustain itself over the course of its running time, but is a remarkable - and remarkably intense - experience nonetheless. He’s a Jewish prisoner and Sonderkommando worker who, in the piles of bodies he needs to clear from the gas chambers every day, discovers the corpse of a young boy he claims is his son. Any first feature that manages to land directly in the competition in Cannes has done something right, and the rookie writer-director here takes a well-known cinematic subject, the Nazi concentration camps, but distils his narrative to the story of just one man: the titular Saul. The hell and horrors of the Nazi death camps have rarely been so vividly suggested - and I do mean suggested, not necessarily depicted - as in Son of Saul( Saul Fia), the imposing debut of Hungarian newcomer Laszlo Nemes.

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