The 50 best films of 2015
in the US
No 1
Son of Saul
Concluding our countdown of the best movies released in the US this year, the harrowing Holocaust drama from Hungarian director László Nemes has come out on top
Andrew Pulver
Friday 18 December 2015 11.21 GMT
The Holocaust is a subject so vast, so brutal and so uncompromisingly repulsive that it has defeated almost every director who has dared take it on: even the most confident film-makers seem to quail before the terrifying responsibility of massacre, torture and sadism – and, essentially, pull their punches. This applies as much to the hyperreal dynamism of Schindler’s List to the eyes-averted sentimentality of Life Is Beautiful, to the maudlin strains of The Pianist. Only documentaries – Resnais’ haunting Night and Fog, the epic Shoah, the recently reconstructed German Concentration Camps Factual Survey – have got close to penetrating the mysteries of this most cataclysmic of human horrors.
But documentaries can only tell you so much; all they can deal with is what has been left behind. Which is where Son of Saul comes in: this is a drama that pitches you, with no fear whatsoever, right into the centre of the hellish maelstrom of the Nazi death camps: its screaming chaos, piled-up corpses, and deathly panic. With a camera shoved permanently right into the face of its central character – a Sonderkommando gas chamber attendant called Saul - this is raw, pitiless cinema, where the trauma and dysfunction of the camp inmates, as well as the unimaginably gruesome nature of their day-to-day living conditions, is made overwhelmingly clear. Leading actor Geza Rohrig turns Saul – who is seeking to extend his certain-to-end lifespan by a matter of days, even hours, to try and track down what he suspects is the body of his son – into a death-haunted figure comparable to a living ghost. No one can know for certain what went on in this nightmarish subworld, but this film has a conviction and plausibility in its detail that means its impact is overwhelming.
But documentaries can only tell you so much; all they can deal with is what has been left behind. Which is where Son of Saul comes in: this is a drama that pitches you, with no fear whatsoever, right into the centre of the hellish maelstrom of the Nazi death camps: its screaming chaos, piled-up corpses, and deathly panic. With a camera shoved permanently right into the face of its central character – a Sonderkommando gas chamber attendant called Saul - this is raw, pitiless cinema, where the trauma and dysfunction of the camp inmates, as well as the unimaginably gruesome nature of their day-to-day living conditions, is made overwhelmingly clear. Leading actor Geza Rohrig turns Saul – who is seeking to extend his certain-to-end lifespan by a matter of days, even hours, to try and track down what he suspects is the body of his son – into a death-haunted figure comparable to a living ghost. No one can know for certain what went on in this nightmarish subworld, but this film has a conviction and plausibility in its detail that means its impact is overwhelming.
But Son of Saul never indulges in anything so unthinking as unvarnished realism: its pushed-in camera means that its horrors are conveyed mostly off camera and around its edges, via sound, snatched glimpses, blurry unfocussed details. It’s fashionable to call this kind of cinema “immersive”, but that does Son of Saul a disservice: it’s not some sort of theme-park ride. This is cinema as living nightmare from which it is impossible to awake. Quite where first time writer-director László Nemes got the guts to do it is another question: but it’s no fluke, as his short film With a Little Patience shows. With Son of Saul, Nemes has achieved something genuinely extraordinary; in its ability to approach and apprehend the most ruinous tragedy of our age, he has achieved where many others have failed – or at least come up short. Shockingly, it was passed over for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, but Son of Saul is certainly film of the year; possibly of the decade too.
The best 50 films of 2015 in the US
01. Son of Saul
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