The story takes place in the center of hell, Auschwitz, where Sol, a member of the Prisoner Detachment (Sonderkommando), identified a body as his son after a gas purge, and within a day and a half later, obsessed with it. He shuttled through the concentration camps, trying to find Jewish rabbis for his burial.
Son of Thor's script is based on a book called "Voices from the Ashes". Unlike the "survivor" perspective of "Schindler's List", "Son of Saul" comes from the inside perspective of the detachment witnesses, and is the reality of the dead. In the concentration camps, death was the norm. Jews were poisoned en masse, their bodies were burned in incinerators, and their ashes were scattered into rivers. The contingents took on the assembly line, mechanically cleaning batch after batch of Jews, until a few months later, when they would also be cleaned, and again and again.
It's hard to say no to a story set against this historical backdrop. Thor, with the detachment logo painted on his back, is a walking corpse, and it is unreasonable and cruel to criticize a dead person. So Saul's paranoid search for the rabbi is an irrefutable journey to find redemption. So in the movie, even if Sol puts the doctor in danger and takes away the body, or loses the explosive pack necessary for his companion to survive for a fake rabbi, the audience can only collectively lose their voices for this act of redemption. In essence, this is a condescending large-scale value kidnapping. Who is qualified to judge what is right and wrong in the Holocaust?
I can't agree with this way of pursuing redemption, because the obsession that caused the act itself is really difficult to resonate with me. Losing the foundation of resonance and weak performance in dramatic conflict, in terms of movie viewing (let alone values), it is really impossible to recommend.
The film spreads with Sol as the center in the logical space, often overlapping and alternating with a variety of symbolic figures and voices to express the chaos and disorder within Auschwitz. Shooting with a shoulder-resistant camera, using multiple groups of long shots and medium and close shots to not follow Sol, successfully created a subjective perspective at the center of "horror". The director chose to give up the perspective of God, and forced the audience to accept and agree with the author's perspective through the narrow and cramped perspective space formed by the 1.33 aspect ratio and 40mm film. In the whole process, the audience can only follow hard, and there is not much room for choice (refer to "Adele's Life"). In the case of viewpoints first, coupled with the negative physiological reactions (dizziness, nausea, vomiting, etc.) caused by the handheld shooting itself, the viewing process is really quite painful for viewers who are already skeptical like me. A rough estimate is that within 1 hour and 47 minutes, I fell asleep once, watched the progress bar about 8 times, and had 27 comprehensive stress reactions such as depression, depression, anger, and flipping the table.
Son of Saul is a feature-length debut directed by director Laszlo Nemesch. It was shortlisted in the main competition unit of the 68th Cannes Film Festival and won the Best Foreign Language Film of the 88th Golden Man, which can be regarded as a blockbuster. Early Laszlo from Antonioni (Italian realist director, one of the most influential directors in film aesthetics, representative works "Adventure", "Eclipse", "Red Desert"), Tarkovsky (Russian director, on film language He has made outstanding contributions to the poetic narrative, and has studied in the director's "Auteur Cinema" (Auteur Cinema) for his representative works "Ivan's Childhood", "Nostalgia" and "Sacrifice". During his tenure as an assistant in the production crew of the famous film master Bela Tarr (Hungarian director, representative of "The Horse of Turin", "The Whale Circus" and "Satan Tango"), he was influenced by a lot of Tarr's aesthetic style. Laszlo learned the way of thinking about movies from Tarr, and gradually explored his own voice in the practice of three short films, and finally presented an isolated, realistic and calm aesthetic style in "Son of Thor".
Of course, Son of Saul is only Laszlo's first feature film, and it's still too early to say the aesthetic has taken shape. For me, "Son of Thor" also seems too metaphysical and symbolic, and the expression from this context may come too lightly. I am more curious whether Laszlo will choose a conflict focused on the individual to speak in the future. I want to know if he has abandoned the big background and separated from the heavy materials, whether this kind of rough realistic aesthetics combined with the Dogme 95 style is still acceptable. effect.
Just wait and see.
Reference reading: "The Main Book" x "Son of Sol" Director Jerese: I want to tell about death
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