While it might be Laszlo Nemes' only film, The Son of Saul will suffice to leave its mark on cinematic history.
A film about extermination which uses a wide-angled lens and wide shots ought to have been obscene. Claude Lanzmann knows that, who, with Shoah, created an insurmountable masterpiece through its scope, strength and universality. But Laszlo Nemes' first full-length feature film is an extension of that, which was thought to be impossible: it's a fiction, in the lowest depths of the world, seen through the eyes of, and only the eyes of Saul, a Hungarian Jew deported and assigned to the Sonderkommandos.
His job: to help the Nazis pile into the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau during that summer of 1944, the 12,000 men, women and children to be exterminated every day. Then, to clean up the area once the Zyklon B had dispersed, and to lug the dead bodies to the trucks which would discharge them into the crematory ovens, before scattering their ashes, so as to make the crime go unseen.
Saul's survival, a few weeks. His eyes, dead. His humanity, destroyed.
Until the moment when he thinks that he has recognized his own son among one of the dead bodies removed from the gas chamber, and when he wants, desperately, in a quest as absurd as it is impossible, to give him a grave and ceremony so that he doesn't go like the others, up in smoke.
For the first time in my life, I had a vision of what we call hell.
The sound is maddening: an incessant racket, the voices, the screams, the orders, and the rumbling of the crematory ovens, forever, constantly. The picture is extremely discreet. We don't see, but rather we perceive the corpses, piled up naked in the torture chambers, and then in front of the graves when the ovens would be so full that the SS couldn't manage to kill at the same insane pace as the arrivals.
We experience the odor, we hear the looks, we feel the smoldering chaos. Our senses are shaken like never before while nothing is actually shown.
The film's realism clings to its very lack of realism. The very clever use of blurring and of a shallow-focus composition give the nightmare a look which is both precise and lost: for the first time in my life, I had a vision of what we call hell. And our imagination is contorted, under the gas and the fire, the bodies of the damned, without them ever being shown, not even once.
This film is a must-see because it has an unimaginable power. Because it is a cinematic masterpiece that overwhelms the body and the mind. Because, as with all the stories of the survivors of Auschwitz, Phnom Penh, and Kigali, we learn more and understand less about how men could have imagined, developed and executed such an extermination, without dismay and without terror, and for many of them, survive peacefully.
When you leave the dark room, you thank Laszlo Nemes for this unforgettable shock and you feel the desire to bless every bit of sweet autumn sunlight which pacifies the hallucinations, without erasing the maddening imprint at the bottom of your throat.
This post first appeared on HuffPost France. It has been translated into English and edited for clarity.