Son of Saul

Son of Saul is set in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944. Saul Ausländer, a Hungarian Jewish prisoner, is a member of the Sonderkommando, the unit of inmates kept apart from the rest of the camp and forced to assist the Nazis in the machinery of extermination. While clearing one of the gas chambers, he sees a boy die and becomes convinced the body is his son. He resolves to keep the corpse out of the crematorium furnaces and give it a proper Jewish burial, a task that means hiding the body and finding a rabbi to recite the funeral prayer. Around him, other members of the Sonderkommando are preparing an uprising. Whether the boy really was his son is left open.

The film was directed by László Nemes, who wrote the screenplay with Clara Royer. It was his first feature; his later films are Orphan and Moulin. Géza Röhrig plays Saul, with Levente Molnár, Urs Rechn, Todd Charmont, Jerzy Walczak and Balázs Farkas among a credited cast of 67. Produced in Hungary by the Hungarian National Film Fund and Laokoon Filmgroup on a budget of about 1 million USD, it took roughly 2 million USD worldwide.

On IMDb the film holds 8.9/10 from 233 reviews, while on TMDB it has 7.1/10 from 1,197 votes, a gap that suggests critics responded to it more strongly than the wider audience did. It runs 107 minutes.