Their decision to shoot on 35mm film stock lends the images an immense tactility and subtle richness of color, even within the squalid, shadowy camp interiors (as expertly re-created by production designer Laszlo Rajk). One of the film’s scrupulously observed ground rules, then, is that we will see only what Saul sees, and Nemes and his gifted cinematographer Matyas Erdely fully commit to this persistence-of-vision tactic by filming in long, unbroken handheld shots that can last for minutes (the film’s clearest debt to the ascetic style of Hungarian master Bela Tarr, for whom Nemes served as an assistant director on 2007’s “The Man From London”). It’s typical of the ruthlessness of the film’s approach that we first encounter Saul on the job, as he and his fellow workers come alongside a group of new arrivals and steer them into the “undressing room.” The discretion and matter-of-factness of the horror only makes it that much more unsettling: We hear screams briefly issuing forth from the gas chambers, but the camera doesn’t venture inside until afterward, when Saul and the others are dutifully removing the bodies and scrubbing down the walls and floors in preparation for the next group. Nemes’ film, by contrast, distinguishes itself in both its verisimilitude and its unrelenting focus on one individual, Saul Auslander (Geza Rohrig, making his own exceptional screen debut), a Hungarian Jewish man who works with a Sonderkommando unit at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The wretched fate of these custodians of death - their uniquely up-close perspective on the workings of the Final Solution and the unspeakable guilt they suffered for their participation - was addressed earlier in not only “Shoah” but also Tim Blake Nelson’s “The Grey Zone” (2001), which starred David Arquette as an American-accented Jewish captive in an ensemble drama too archly stylized for its own good. Not for nothing does the story center around a fictional member of the Sonderkommandos, those Jewish workers who were forced to assist in the mass murder and disposal of their own, delaying their own executions by mere months. Boldly courting the kind of debate about how (or whether) the Nazi death camps should be depicted that dates back at least as far as Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah” (1985), “Son of Saul” is likely to draw admiration and outrage alike: Does its uncompromising restraint and formal rigor serve as a corrective to the sensationalism and sentimentality favored by Hollywood, or does it merely substitute one form of exploitation for another? To the credit of Nemes (who co-scripted with Clara Royer), his immersive yet powerfully withholding film is clearly built for, and comfortable with, a measure of moral ambiguity.
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