Son of Saul (2015) review

Sonderkommando Saul Ausländer (Géza Röhrig) - a Hungarian Jew made to clean up the dead after they've been killed by the Nazis - is determined to save his (non-biological) 'son' and attempt the impossible task of burying him instead of having him autopsied and incinerated. It's similar to Aleksei German's Hard to Be a God with its (ill-advised) myopic filmmaking technique - everything in the background is out-of-focus, with (mostly) Röhrig's face in close-up, 'blurring' the countless atrocities all around him - and just as infuriatingly superficial: it uses the seismic power of an event like the Holocaust to compensate for its lack of any tangible substance or broader statement about a horrific tragedy (it's clear Saul's gone mad, with his Sisyphean mission endangering others around him and himself). Rubbing an audience's face in muck and death and adding nothing to it is shameless, regardless of the intent.