'Son of Saul' -- a holocaust movie unlike any other

Few people remain who can testify as to what life was like inside a Nazi death camp, but something about ``Son of Saul'' -- a holocaust movie unlike any other -- feels intuitively true. It depicts a technological perversion, a death factory that, for its function, depends on an absence of emotion. ``Son of Saul'' presents horror with little drama.

The opening sequence achieves the outer limits of film art. Movies simply don't get more powerful than this. It begins out of focus, with a blurred figure walking toward the camera. As he comes into focus, he stops, as if inviting us to take a look at him. And then the shot continues, filming him closely, from around the chest up, as he goes about his business, commotion all around him. It takes perhaps 30 seconds to realize that Saul is a member of the Sonderkommando, a Jew who is herding other Jews from a train platform to a gas chamber.

In two unbroken shots, the camera stays tight on Saul, but we can tell what's happening all around him from the little that we do see and from everything that we hear. A German voice instructs the prisoners to undress and says that, following a shower, everyone will be served hot soup. (``Hurry, or the soup will get cold!'') And then, seconds after the doors close, we hear the screams, which get louder and louder, before going quiet. By that time, Saul has already begun taking the clothes off the hooks to sort through belongings.

This technique of keeping the camera close and never leaving a protagonist has been perfected in recent years by the Belgian filmmakers, the Dardenne brothers. It's a means of burrowing into a character's consciousness, and director Laszlo Nemes does this to devastating effect. As Saul, actor Geza Rohrig keeps his face blank -- he has to, or the prisoners will panic. And yet, either the context or something happening behind the eyes reveals everything he can't show -- that he's beaten, that he's without hope, that he has walled himself off to the terror, but that he's also alert, that he's not dead inside.

This still-living part of Saul springs to turbulent life when he sees a little boy laid out on a slab and become obsessed with sparing the boy's body from dissection and burning. He sets out to find a way that the body can be laid to rest by a rabbi with full Jewish ceremony. This is, in essence, the story of ``Son of Saul,'' though the experience of the film has much more to do with the workings of the death camp, which never ceases to be degrading, threatening and lethal.

The identity of the boy is never made clear. Some will see the boy as Saul's son. Some will see him as someone Saul believes could be his son. And some will see the boy as Saul's breaking point, the embodiment of the crime and insult to Saul's people made manifest in a single tragedy. However you see it, ``Son of Saul'' is a better film if the boy is not Saul's son, and that his fixation is rather a kind of irrational response to irrationality -- or to be more precise, an irrational humane response to irrational cruelty.

Here the connection between Laszlo Nemes and the Dardenne brothers becomes even more arresting, when we remember that one of their great films--``The Son''--told the story of a father who lost his own son and becomes obsessed with another boy of the same age. Perhaps Neme had something like this in mind for Saul's back story, as well.

Almost in passing, and all the more effective for the lack of emphasis, we see the camp's different ways of killing people, and hear the language that's used. ``Burn the pieces,'' the Germans say. Not ``the bodies.'' A dead child is referred to as ``It.'' At one point, one of the Sonderkommandos talks about a particularly attractive young woman who gave him ``a look'' on the way to the gas chamber. He feels there was some kind of communication between them. The notion of normal human connection existing in the midst of ultimate human perversity--it's almost too much to bear.

And so is the movie, almost too much to bear. But brace yourself and see it anyway. It's worth it.

Mick LaSalle is The San Francisco Chronicle's movie critic. E-mail: mlasalle@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @MickLaSalle

Son of Saul

4 stars out of 4 stars

Drama. Starring Geza Rohrih. Directed by Laszlo Neme. (R. 107 minutes.)