It's a remarkable performance, all the more so for being his first.
Face grizzled with the horrors he's witnessed, jaw fixed in determination, Röhrig's Saul lingers long in the mind. From there, he embarks on a mission to find a rabbi to give him a Jewish burial, doggedly negotiating Nazi doctors, an all-pervading sense of fatalism and a planned camp uprising in his quest for recover some humanity from this hell. Saul of Tarsus was brought up the son of a Pharisee and followed in his father’s footsteps, moving to Jerusalem as a young teenager to study the Law under Gamaliel. Then Saul gave his daughter Michal to David in marriage.
THE SON OF SAUL FULL
He brought their foreskins and presented them as payment in full to become the kings son-in-law. 1 Samuel 18:27 David and his men went out and killed two hundred Philistines. In this maelstrom, Saul stumbles, somewhat improbably, upon a dead child he takes to be his son. Now Sauls daughter Michal loved David, and when this was reported to Saul, it pleased him. The camera fixes on his face in shallow focus throughout, the chaos and horror of his world often just a background blur that's soundtracked by the bark of Nazi guards, the clank of metal doors and the muffled chatter of his fellow unit members. We meet Saul at the chaos of the camp railhead, shepherding his fellow Jews, terrified and disorientated, unwittingly to their deaths. The line between life and death has never been literal. Saul Auslander (Geza Rohrig) toils under brutal conditions as a member of the Sonderkommando, the slave workers forced to. A red cross on his shirt is the only protection from a summary, anonymous death. Afforded special privileges in return for labouring in the gas chambers, Saul wears the haunted pallor of a man who know he's still destined to die, just not when or how. Where Schindler's List adopted the perspective of those herded into the camp, Son Of Saul rides shotgun with one of Auschwitz's maligned Sonderkommando. It's a film that bores straight into your soul and leaves you shattered, but somehow richer for having seen it.