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Most famously, in a dispatch from Cannes, The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis called the film “radically dehistoricized” and “intellectually repellent,” noting that the film’s unrelenting use of close-ups “transform all the screaming, weeping condemned men, women and children into anonymous background blurs.” Stefan Grissemann in Film Comment finds the film similarly morally reprehensible, taking issue with inaccuracies about the reality of life in Auschwitz and, more significantly, objecting to the idea of setting a suspenseful thriller in a concentration camp, asserting that “In its pursuit of controversy, Son of Saul plumbs unforeseeably new depths of revulsion.” While Grissemann recognizes the film’s accomplished aesthetics, he finds that its very virtuosity contributes to the work’s ethical emptiness.
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However rigorous and well-intentioned the film is, however, it has also received critiques as vitriolic as its positive reviews are gushing. The film fits most nearly into the intellectual tradition of documentaries like Night and Fog (1955) and Shoah (1985) and European works about the Holocaust that attempt to probe the existential implications of mechanized mass murder and the widespread, spectacular failure of empathy. Shot entirely in close-up on the protagonist’s face, the film communicates the alienation of a man in an impossible position and uses the haunted visage of actor Géza Röhrig, peripheral images, and soundscapes to depict the unimaginable.
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What sets Son of Saul apart from these film is not its content, but its aesthetic approach to depicting the horrors of the Shoah and its total rejection of the hope and sentimentality associated with films like Schindler’s List.
#Golden globe son of saul movie#
The phenomenon has become so well-established that it has become a familiar joke: years before her Oscar win for her performance in The Reader (2008), Kate Winslet joked on the show Extras (2005) that appearing in a Holocaust movie is a sure-fire way to finally take home a shiny gold man. Of course, it is hardly unusual for a film about the Holocaust to receive awards nominations – indeed, an entire cinematic subgenre on the topic has emerged in recent years, with films from Schindler’s List(1994) to Life is Beautiful (1997) to The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (2008) regularly racking up awards. The film has received numerous glowing reviews, with critics declaring that it “ illustrates the potential for cinema to push its linguistic and interpretive boundaries into new arenas” and “has found a way to create a fictional drama with a gaunt, fierce kind of courage.” After winning the Grand Prix at Cannes this summer, the film has garnered a Golden Globe nomination for Best Foreign Film. Set in Auschwitz in 1944, the film follows a Sonderkommando – one of a select group of prisoners who worked in the gas chambers – who discovers the body of a young boy he believes to be his son, and becomes determined to give the boy a proper burial. Undoubtedly, the most unrelenting film on the fall slate, however, is Hungarian director László Nemes’ debut feature, Son of Saul (2015). This fall movie season has seen the release of films dealing with a range of heavy topics, from gang violence in Chicago to man’s battle with the brutality of nature.