This movie starts completely out of focus - literally. The viewer sees only vague shapes moving around. Is this a technical error or an experiment gone wrong? Nothing of the kind. After a while, the face of lead character Saul Auslander moves close to the camera - and into focus.

And it stays this way. In the first few minutes, the camera stays within a range of 50 centimeters from Saul's face. Or I should say: Saul's head - because sometimes we see only the side or the back of his head.

The effect of this style of filming is no less than spectacular. All kinds of things are happening around Saul. Horrible things, we soon learn. But we never get to see them close by. We only see shapes, out of focus, at the extreme fringes of the screen, and we hear the sounds. And we keep seeing his face, in focus. He moves around, works, does things, and all the while all we see is his face.

Soon we understand where he is: in a Nazi concentration camp. Saul belongs to a Sonderkommando, a group of Jews who are temporarily spared from death to do the labour the Germans don't want to do. In the midst of the terrible atrocities, it becomes his mission to bury a boy he believes is his son.

This film is unique in showing the concentration camp for what is is: hell on earth. Naked dead bodies being dragged around, desperate people being shot indiscriminately, complete absence of anything humanity stands for. It is exactly this total loss of dignity that drives Saul in his hopeless quest for a way to organize a proper burial for the dead boy.

Son of Saul is the complete antithesis of that other monumental Holocaust movie: Schindler's List. While Spielberg's film is made according to all the rules of good film making, Son of Saul is a claustrophobic trip, without any possible concession to commercial appeal. The dialogue is often hardly comprehensible, spoken in three languages, sometimes not louder than a whisper. Not all the acts and events are quite clear, and only after a while you understand what exactly drives Saul.

This is a unique, hard-hitting movie experience. When you go see it, don't expect a well-rounded story with heroes and villains and a nice ending. But expect to be swept away.

It's October 1944 Auschwitz-Birkenau. Saul Ausländer is a Hungarian Jew working as a Sonderkommando member. They clean up the gas chamber, clear the bodies, and collect the prisoners' belongings. One boy manages to survive the gassing. The Nazi doctor suffocates the boy and orders an autopsy. Saul steals the body and tries to recruit a rabbi to give the boy a proper burial.

This is a harrowing tale. It is unrelenting and unforgiving. The point of view camera style takes the audience right into the horrors. It gives the audience a front row seat. One could almost smell the sick in the gas chamber. This movie takes hold and never lets go.

"Son of Saul" or "Saul fia" is a Hungarian film from last year that won big at Cannes and also took home the Golden Globe and Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. And in my opinion, the got it wrong again. "ida" was already a pretty weak winner last year and same goes for "Son of Saul". It looks to me as if people are appreciating this film because of the difficult and controversial subject. But this alone should not be enough. A film also has to tell a compelling story and this one does not I think. The film runs for slightly over 100 minutes and most of it, actually everything except the ending, takes place in a concentration camp. Another thing about this movie why it was so successful is that the ending is pretty memorable and dramatic and makes it easy to forget about the boredom from the previous 1.5 hours.

But I will not. The writer and director here is László Nemes and he is still pretty young, under 40, so we may hear a lot more from him in the future. i cannot say, however, that this film makes me curious about other projects from him. Lead actor is Géza Röhrig and he is completely new to acting it seems. Taking this into account, he did a pretty good job. I have read people say he should have been nominated for an Oscar, but I cannot agree with that. Still, it was a fairly convincing performance and he carried the film nicely from start to finish, given he was in pretty much every scene from start to finish. It is not his fault that the movie did not turn out so well. The problem is one that I just mentioned. Rührig is in every scene and the camera is always extremely close to him. I found this style of direction pretty unappealing, almost annoying at times. You can see the filmmaker's intention to let the audience perceive the action exactly like the protagonist does, but for me it did not work. This was a major turnoff for me here and I may have liked the film better with another approach by Nemes. But I have seen an older short film by him and it seems that he frequently takes this path. All in all, I do not recommend "Son of Saul". The protagonist's story was interesting only on a couple occasions, but not enough for such a long film and in terms of historic context we learn nothing here that we did not already know about concentration camps and WWII history if we have only very basic knowledge. Thumbs down.