Son of Saul

László Nemes's Son of Saul won the Grand Prix at Cannes 2015 (Nemes's debut feature) followed by the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the Golden Globe in the same category, and the BAFTA. Nemes, then thirty-eight, had been an assistant to Béla Tarr; the formal radicality of Son of Saul showed both the inheritance and the departure.

October 1944, Auschwitz-Birkenau. Saul Ausländer (Géza Röhrig, in a performance built almost entirely from peripheral vision and held breath) is a Hungarian Jew in the Sonderkommando, the prisoners forced to operate the gas chambers in exchange for their own short-term survival. Saul discovers among the bodies a boy he believes to be his son, and becomes consumed with the impossible task of finding a rabbi to perform a Jewish burial, even as the Sonderkommando's planned uprising approaches. The film is shot in a restricted 1.37:1 aspect ratio and almost entirely in shallow-focus close-up on Saul's face, with the camp's machinery of death rendered as a sustained out-of-focus horror in the background.

Nemes and his cinematographer Mátyás Erdély's choice (to refuse to show what the audience knows is happening, and instead to track Saul's almost autistic concentration on the single private mission) was widely understood at the time as the most ethically defensible Holocaust-cinema strategy since Lanzmann's Shoah. The film has been written about extensively in academic literature on Holocaust representation, particularly in Sight & Sound, Cahiers du Cinéma and the journal Film Quarterly.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The most formally radical Holocaust film since Shoah, and one of the most assured debut features of the 2010s. A film whose every formal choice carries moral weight.