Son of Saul
Sony Pictures Classics | Release Date: December 18, 2015 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
91
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 49 Critic Reviews
Positive:
47
Mixed:
2
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
The Irish TimesTara BradySep 1, 2020
It’s not the banality of evil that chills so much here as its matter-of-factness. This is really something. Read full review
100
The Irish TimesDonald ClarkeSep 1, 2020
It is the breathless dynamics of Son of Saul that really sets it apart. Read full review
100
Total FilmMatt GlasbyMay 28, 2019
A film to make your blood run cold, Nemes’ first-person account of life, and death, in a concentration camp contains horrors you can’t – and shouldn’t – unsee. Read full review
100
LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenFeb 6, 2019
If the moral horror of the Holocaust is at once crystal clear and unfathomable, then Son of Saul exists in that tension, employing the art of cinema to create a singular act of remembrance. Read full review
100
The Observer (UK)Mark KermodeJan 4, 2019
I struggle to remember the last time a non-documentary film proved so profoundly, soul-shakingly distressing. This is as it should be – anything less would be immoral and irresponsible. Read full review
100
EmpirePhil de SemlyenJan 4, 2019
It's a film that bores straight into your soul and leaves you shattered, but somehow richer for having seen it. Read full review
100
The Film StageGiovanni Marchini CamiaJan 4, 2019
As a viewing experience, it is relentlessly harrowing, bordering on the traumatizing. Yet while Son of Saul dares to delve even further into the horror than the majority of Holocaust films, never once does it so much as threaten to slip into exploitative territory. Read full review
100
The Seattle TimesSoren AndersenDec 18, 2018
Röhrig’s performance is an extraordinary feat of minimalism. His expressions convey a deadened spirit. Yet behind his eyes and at the corners of his mouth are signs of a spirit that won’t be crushed. Read full review
100
Time OutDave CalhounDec 18, 2018
It's impossible not to see Son of Saul as a corrective to past stories that have imposed a neat order (or worse) on such incomprehensible events. Nemes does that too, of course, simply by making this film – but he does so in a way that makes us think of these events afresh. Read full review
100
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperJan 28, 2016
Son of Saul is lasting work of art — difficult to watch, impossible to forget. Read full review
100
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsJan 28, 2016
This is a small, tight, starkly claustrophobic film, closer in impact to Elie Wiesel's first-person account of the concentration camps, "Night," than to the artful, slightly suspect emotional catharsis of director Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List." Read full review
100
Washington PostAnn HornadayJan 14, 2016
Thanks to his taste, rigor and superb sense of control, Nemes manages to create images that are both discreet and graphic, respectful and confrontational, inspiring and unsparing. Read full review
100
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleJan 14, 2016
Almost too much to bear. But brace yourself and see it anyway. It’s worth it. Read full review
100
TimeStephanie ZacharekJan 12, 2016
Röhrig isn’t an experienced actor. In fact, he’s a poet and a former kindergarten teacher, living in the Bronx. But that could be what makes the performance so magnetic. Read full review
100
NPRBob MondelloDec 18, 2015
It's not an easy sit, but it is a riveting, effective one, and a genuine change from the familiar conventions of most holocaust dramas. Read full review
100
The VergeTasha RobinsonDec 18, 2015
It's dizzying and tremendously sad, but simultaneously exhilarating due to Nemes' complete control of his environment, and complete merging of his narrative and compositional elements. It isn't just a unique story, it's a unique execution. Read full review
100
TheWrapInkoo KangDec 18, 2015
It’s that devotion to truth that makes Son of Saul such a difficult watch — and also one of year’s most important masterpieces. Read full review
100
Los Angeles TimesKenneth TuranDec 17, 2015
Son of Saul is an immersive experience of the most disturbing kind, an unwavering vision of a particular kind of hell. No matter how many Holocaust films you've seen, you've not seen one like this. Read full review
100
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternDec 17, 2015
Good movies summon up worlds. Son of Saul, a great movie and a debut feature by László Nemes, summons up a world we may think we know from a visual perspective we’ve never encountered — the willed tunnel vision of a Jewish worker in a Nazi death camp. Read full review
100
SalonAndrew O'HehirDec 16, 2015
Son of Saul is a work of superlative filmmaking craft and moral intensity. Read full review
100
Entertainment WeeklyChris NashawatyDec 16, 2015
It’s the rarest kind of moviegoing experience: an absolute masterpiece. Read full review
100
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Kate TaylorNov 4, 2015
Unusual for a Holocaust drama, the film offers no false hope of rescue or resurrection, but does insist that our bearing witness matters. Read full review
100
Screen DailyJonathan RomneyMay 24, 2015
Using techniques of distanciation that sometimes make it an alienating, even confusing experience, László Nemes’s cogent, strikingly confident debut is harrowing, but cinematically rewarding. Read full review
100
The TelegraphTim RobeyMay 24, 2015
The film's effect is anti-emotional, and that's the point; it's about the insatiable process of humanity working to eradicate all traces of itself. There's no time left to weep, because the nerve endings are already dead. Read full review
100
CineVueJohn BleasdaleMay 24, 2015
Son of Saul is not simply a good film, it feels like an urgent and important one, a warning from history. Read full review
100
The GuardianPeter BradshawMay 24, 2015
By any standards, this would be an outstanding film, but for a debut it is remarkable. Read full review
100
HitfixGregory EllwoodMay 24, 2015
In terms of filmmaking prowess, "remarkable" may not do Laszlo Nemes' holocaust drama "Son of Saul" justice. Read full review
91
ConsequenceDominick Suzanne-MayerDec 21, 2015
At times, László Nemes’ film induces the sensation of drowning, slowly. Not the kind where you’re pulled under by the riptide, but the kind where you’ve been treading water for so long that the body starts to betray you in tiny increments, and any life preserver must be met with utter desperation. Read full review
91
The A.V. ClubA.A. Dowd Dec 16, 2015
No film set over a single day at Auschwitz is going to be an easy sit, and there are moments here, like a mass midnight purging, that threaten an audience’s capacity to keep watching. But Son Of Saul, for all the enormity of its subject matter, is an oddly gripping experience — a vision of intense purpose found in what may be the final hours of a life. Read full review
91
IndieWireEric KohnMay 24, 2015
A remarkable refashioning of the Holocaust drama that reignites the setting with extraordinary immediacy, Son of Saul is both terrifying to watch and too gripping in its moment-to-moment to look away. Read full review
90
The AtlanticChristopher OrrJan 4, 2019
It is not—if my description has somehow failed to make this clear—an easy film to watch. But it is a forceful and unsettling addition to the cinema of the Holocaust, a film that digs deeply into the gruesome workings of the death camps and ponders questions about duties to the living and duties to the dead. Read full review
90
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzJan 14, 2016
Son of Saul offers Nemes' harrowing vision of the possibility of peace, at least within oneself. And it is a singular vision, one that demands to be shared. Read full review
90
The New YorkerAnthony LaneDec 14, 2015
The remarkable thing is that Son of Saul is a début: Nemes has never directed a full-length film before. As for Röhrig, he is a poet as well as an actor, born in Budapest and now living in the Bronx. If neither of them made another movie, this one would suffice. Read full review
90
VarietyJustin ChangMay 24, 2015
The result is as grim and unyielding a depiction of the Holocaust as has yet been made on that cinematically overworked subject — a masterful exercise in narrative deprivation and sensory overload that recasts familiar horrors in daringly existential terms. Read full review
89
Austin ChronicleMarc SavlovFeb 24, 2016
The effect is devastating, both emotionally and physically. You literally can’t take your eyes off Saul. Read full review
88
Charlotte ObserverLawrence ToppmanFeb 11, 2016
Hungarian writer-director László Nemes makes an extraordinary feature-length debut with this film, which requires us to put together bits of information and leaves us guessing at a few missing pieces. Read full review
88
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliJan 28, 2016
The film’s contribution is the unique perspective it provides about what it meant to work in a death camp. Read full review
88
Boston GlobeTy BurrJan 21, 2016
On the whole it’s daring and committed, and in Röhrig’s tremendously focused performance, it honors all the saints we’ll never know. And that’s worth any risk. Read full review
88
Philadelphia InquirerSteven ReaJan 21, 2016
Offers a crushing view of humanity at its most desperate, and a view of one man's fevered efforts to find grace and dignity amid the horror. Read full review
88
RogerEbert.comChristy LemireDec 18, 2015
Röhrig has the tricky task of carrying this story on his shoulders—and us along with him—without the benefit of being able to emote or even say much. It’s a physical performance as much as it is a quietly emotional one; he has to establish who this man is mainly through his gestures, demeanor and energy. Read full review
88
Rolling StonePeter TraversDec 18, 2015
There's nothing trivial about this Hungarian masterwork from first-time director László Nemes. You don't merely witness horror, you feel it in your bones. Read full review
83
The PlaylistOliver LytteltonMay 24, 2015
Though it has a few elements of its construction that might be questionable, it's mostly a powerful, thoughtful, and visually striking picture. Read full review
80
Village VoiceScott TobiasDec 15, 2015
Nemes does everything he can to connect the audience to Saul's numbness, shielding us as much as possible from the cacophony of human misery that rings in his ears. The chill seeps in regardless, as it should, and Nemes doesn't try to counter it with more than a tiny, stubborn flicker of hope. Read full review
80
The Hollywood ReporterBoyd van HoeijMay 24, 2015
Utterly uneasy to watch but strikingly and confidently assembled, the film is a powerful aural and visual experience that doesn’t quite manage to sustain itself over the course of its running time, but is a remarkable — and remarkably intense — experience nonetheless. Read full review
75
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerDec 18, 2015
Of course, on some level, no movie about this subject can fail to move us, and Son of Saul has its share of powerful sequences. I wanted it to be great, though, with a largeness of vision to match the awful immensity of its subject. Read full review
70
The New York TimesA.O. ScottDec 17, 2015
Mr. Nemes orchestrates a tour de force of suspense, a swift symphony of collisions, coincidences and reversals that is almost unbearably exciting. His skill is undeniable, but also troubling. The movie offers less insight than sensation, an emotional experience that sits too comfortably within the norms of entertainment. This is not entirely the director’s fault. The Holocaust, once forbidden territory, is now safe and familiar ground. Read full review
63
New York PostFarran Smith NehmeDec 16, 2015
Yet while Nemes criticized “Schindler’s List” as “conventional,” all that’s new here is the hyper-realistic technique: Saul’s quest is not very far from the girl in the red dress. Read full review
50
Slant MagazineEd GonzalezDec 10, 2015
The film's meticulousness orchestration only calls attention to its dubious sense of purpose, which lies beyond human subjectivity. Read full review
40
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinJan 8, 2016
The movie doesn’t expand in your mind — it shrinks along with its protagonist, its conclusion a reductio ad absurdum. Read full review
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