Son of Saul Review

Son of Saul, the best film I saw at Cannes 2015, is out in UK cinemas today. It's relentlessly grim, but an unforgettable watch. If you can find a cinema near you playing it over the next few months, I highly recommend it. It's not going to be as big as Captain America: Civil War, but it deserves your attention!

Here's a snippet from my review:

The gas chambers, the incinerators and the sickening machinery of genocide are all vividly dissected in Son of Saul as viewers are plunged into the midst of Hitler’s Final Solution at work. Audiences are dragged along on the gut wrenching journey of one man, a tiny cog in this machine of mass slaughter. For those who think they’ve seen all the horror that holocaust films can muster, Son of Saul scrapes new depths of despair in its harrowing depiction of the inner workings of Auschwitz in 1944.

We follow title character Saul, a Hungarian prisoner working as a member of the Sonderkommando at an Auschwitz crematorium. His job is to herd his fellow Jews to the gas chambers, where he then scrubs away the evidence of their deaths, before removing the bodies and plundering their belongings for the Nazis. But when the seemingly desensitised Saul finds the body of a boy he takes to be his son, he suddenly finds a way to grasp at some small sense of redemption in amongst all the senseless killing. He makes it his mission to save the boy’s corpse from cremation, and to find a rabbi who can recite the Kaddish prayer as he buries his child. Even as those around him plan rebellion in order to stand a chance at survival, Saul sticks rigidly to his plan to find a way to give the boy a proper burial.

You can check out the rest of my review at Tastic Film here.

Here's the trailer:



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