Le Fils de Saul

La connexion intelligente quasi-enregistrement subjectif, qui relate de manière documentaire l'intrigue et l'environnement horrifiant réel de l'enfer, que personne ne veut vraiment vivre de si près. Aucun autre mot que "enfer" n'est plus approprié pour les scènes nocturnes près des fosses. Un début de réalisation honorable de Hongrie. Si vous n'avez pas vu La Zone Grise et que vous ne connaissez pas le terme "Sonderkommando", ce film vous tuera. (14/10/2015)

Défi ciné 2018 : la Hongrie. Ça faisait belle lurette que je n'avais pas vu un film tourné d’une façon qui me déplaisait à ce point et qui, de surcroît, me faisait mal aux yeux. Mais quelle était l’intention ? Me plonger, moi le spectateur, dans une sorte de jeu vidéo suggestif et ridicule dans lequel je n’ai jamais la moindre idée de ce qui va m’arriver parce que tout autour de moi est flou et que tout ce que je perçois n’est que cris et bruits ? Ici, je ne suis pas du tout rentré dans le trip du réalisateur. Et ça confirme que la Hongrie est bien le pays le plus faible du V4 en matière de cinéma. (09/04/2018)

A movie without the past and the future, which will be (not only because of this) described as a holocaust-style Come and See (1985). Thanks to the chosen format of "long scenes over the shoulder", it is unusually intense, suggestive (amazing sound work!) and gets under you skin very quickly and for a long time. Maybe too much, because it's constantly moving and it is so dynamic that the viewer (nor the character) will be sitting on the edge of his char all the time. What can happen is that the viewer becomes used to it by the end of the movie, although the horrors during the Sonderkommando shift are shown "seemingly accidentally", are sidelined and presented as a daily routine. But as a result it is even more terrifying and disturbing. No matter whether you become used to it or not and whether you can get over it or not, it is indisputable that Saul's son is one of the exceptions confirming the rule that the film's qualities and the importance and urgency of the theme form one functional unit, which rightfully deserves "festival fame". If nothing else, it is because such a view of the film depiction of the Holocaust through the industrialization of death was desperately needed, because although these events are captured in literature from time to time they are almost never depicted in a movie. (10/10/2015)

The wiping of vomit and blood and the removal of fresh corpses from the just-used gas chamber, the precisely organized loading of those corpses into furnaces, the constant dumping of ashes into the river; people reduced to mere numerical units, "pieces", worthless waste – killing as a manufacturing process. Killing as a perfectly lubricated and thought-out machine, whose puppets and operators in one – sonderkommando – have prolonged their lives by at least a few months, and who carry the corpses with complacency, without emotions and emotional outpourings (what else is left for them), as if they were operating a machine tool. And in that darkness of inhumanity and filth, like a faint glimmer of humanity, there’s the desire of one of the sonderkommando to bury – as civilized society should – one dead boy. A film that everyone should watch. Especially the fucked up Nazi dumbasses, who I'm under no illusions would be moved, but if even just one in a thousand said to themselves "God, what an asshole I am!", this movie would make sense. Only an idiot can "get bored" or "fall asleep", as I have read here a few times, with this overwhelming experience. (29/02/2016)

(BE2CAN, Lucerna) I’m doubting between four, in recognition for its merits, and three for the experience. After all the hype from Cannes I was expecting more. It’s a different take on the monstrous machinery of the Holocaust from the point of view of a poor bastard who gets mixed up in it. The intention is clear, the execution is undoubtedly appropriate, but I’m not sure it’s enough for me in 107 minutes… (10/10/2015)