Please note: Despite my username this is not available on Netflix, at least it isn't in my region, perhaps it will be different where you are. Either way, I am sure you are clever enough to find the film by other means if you know anything about the internet, which since you are here reading this, I'm going to presume that you do.
The first thing that I like about this film is the fact that it is not a Hollywood film. Nothing against Hollywood (ok, maybe a little) but I tend to feel that smaller studios in non USA organizations tend to work a bit harder on making their films actually compelling with the storyline rather than resorting to big name actors and a 100 million dollar CGI budget. Son of Saul's entire budget was around $2 million and man oh man did they use it efficiently.
The story is about a man named Saul (should be obvious) who is a Hungarian Jew that is forced to work in Auschwitz sifting through the belongings of new arrivals in search of valuable, corralling the prisoners for the gas chambers and even participating in tricking them into thinking this is not a one-way journey, clean the chambers after, and participate in the burning of the corpses.
He is extremely emotionless in his duties but carries them out in a methodical way to suggest that he has been completely demoralized by his imprisonment and he shows little to no emotion throughout the entire film. This role of Saul is brilliantly played by Géza Röhrig, who I would like to see more of if I can find it.
The story twists and turns about what the actual overall objective of the film is, and for the sake of not spoiling things I will not reveal what that is but I will tell you this: Despite his stoic outward appearance, Saul cares very much for the people that he is participating in executing and does what he can to help in ways that will allow him to continue to stay alive. This includes attempting to achieve a proper burial for a Jewish boy and although I can not say this for certain, I think this is the reason for the naming of the film.
Saul doesn't seem to care whether he himself lives or dies, but does what he has to in order to live in the future hope that he will be of some use to helping to eliminate this atrocity. When faced with potential execution for various minor dereliction of duty he is rather expressionless and uncaring. However, it does appear as though his work ethic is what keeps him from being killed on a number of occasions.
This film was nominated for a ton of awards and won the "Best Foreign Language Film" Academy Award as well as a ton of other accolades. Despite this, the film didn't make the much money, well at least not by Marvel standards as it only made 5x the total film budget and the total box office take was less than it costs to get The Rock or Tom Hanks to even be in a film: On that note, neither one of those guys could have pulled this role off.
Should I watch it?
If you are interested in WW2 oriented stuff and can handle a truly tragic true story of the concentration camps during Nazi Germany times, then yes. You need to be capable of reading subtitles and keep your phone away from you during the 90 minutes or so because missing even a few minutes of dialogue will result in you being completely lost.
There are good films, there are great films, then there are films that are works of art: Son of Saul fits into the last category and there for it is highly highly....
