1. Single-person perspective (the camera is always the protagonist and his perspective), the essence of which is perfectly realized at the end of the movie - the protagonist turns into a child (son), and the soul is gone. The only time the protagonist smiled before was like the gratification of the sublimation of his soul before his death. You must know: the protagonist does not have a son. He just sees a child born tenaciously and then strangled under extreme conditions, and regards him as his son. In fact, it is for the belief and achievement of faith. This is evident from his insistence on asking Rabbi for a religious funeral, which is not dead dogmatism or fundamentalism, but a purely extremist realization of belief. So Son of Thor is a metaphor, and so is the kid at the end. They are all manifestations of the beliefs of the protagonist under extremely inhuman conditions.
2. The film reproduces a photo (official name is No.280) taken by prisoners in the Auschwitz concentration camp. In fact, in the entire history of the Holocaust, only a few photographs were taken by prisoners! The photographer is Alberto Errera, not an ordinary prisoner, but Sonderkommando - the staff introduced at the beginning of the film, and the protagonist is also one of them. They are prisoners working in the concentration camps, isolated from other prisoners, but they will also be killed in the end. For these photos, an aesthetician has written a monograph, Images in spite of all: four photographs from Auschwitz, authored by Georges Didi-Huberman.
No.280. The film recreates the shooting of this photo.
View more about Son of Saul reviews
