There are a number of historical events that I'm interested in being immersed in. The Shoah is not one of them. And yet, cinematically, we return there often. Nemes wins praise for the craft with which it transports. It is a visceral film. But even amidst the horrors I found myself drifting, asking myself, "What is the point of all this?"
I don't think that is an unfair question. There have been many angles on the genocide and finding a way to frame the enormity of this black hole of human history is not an easy task. Kubrick summed it up in his succinct takedown of Spielberg: "The Holocaust is about 6 million people who get killed. Schindler’s List is about 600 who don’t."
Nemes' entry point, Saul (Géza Röhrig), a member of the camp's Sonderkommando, the Jewish captives forced to assist with the functioning of the gas chambers, does not seek out such a grandiose act but the attempt to narrativise the Holocaust still troubled me. I guess after seeing the recently released 'German Concentration Camps Factual Survey' and the likes of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, Saul's desperate attempts to bury a boy he has taken for his son, was too narrow, even considering its intentional futility.
Ultimately though, deciding how best to digest this human horror is going to be a very personal thing. Lanzmann has sung the film's praises and it is by all accounts as accurate a representation of the events as we are ever likely to see. I struggled.
★★★☆
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