Son of Saul, the best film I saw at Cannes 2015, is out in UK cinemas today. It's relentlessly grim, but an unforgettable watch. If you can find a cinema near you playing it over the next few months, I highly recommend it. It's not going to be as big as Captain America: Civil War, but it deserves your attention!
Here's a snippet from my review:
The gas chambers, the incinerators and the sickening machinery of
genocide are all vividly dissected in Son of Saul as viewers are plunged
into the midst of Hitler’s Final Solution at work. Audiences are
dragged along on the gut wrenching journey of one man, a tiny cog in
this machine of mass slaughter. For those who think they’ve seen all the
horror that holocaust films can muster, Son of Saul scrapes new depths
of despair in its harrowing depiction of the inner workings of Auschwitz
in 1944.
We follow title character Saul, a Hungarian prisoner
working as a member of the Sonderkommando at an Auschwitz crematorium.
His job is to herd his fellow Jews to the gas chambers, where he then
scrubs away the evidence of their deaths, before removing the bodies and
plundering their belongings for the Nazis. But when the seemingly
desensitised Saul finds the body of a boy he takes to be his son, he
suddenly finds a way to grasp at some small sense of redemption in
amongst all the senseless killing. He makes it his mission to save the
boy’s corpse from cremation, and to find a rabbi who can recite the
Kaddish prayer as he buries his child. Even as those around him plan
rebellion in order to stand a chance at survival, Saul sticks rigidly to
his plan to find a way to give the boy a proper burial.
Despite
being set up in the opening scene as the main character, Jesse Eisenberg takes
a back seat, allowing relatively unknown talent Devin Druid to shine in Joachim
Trier's bittersweet drama Louder Than Bombs. Eisenberg is on solid, if not
exceptional form as a son who returns to the family home to find his father and
younger brother still in a complete mess after the death of his mother. He
injects moments of welcome humour into what could have been a stifling
exploration of grief in the modern world.
College
lecturer Jonah (Eisenberg) has recently become a father himself and is feeling
the weight of responsibility when he is called home to sort through some of his
mother's belongings. His father Gene (Gabriel Byrne) hasn't managed to sort
through the undeveloped photos that his late conflict photographer wife took
before she passed, and now a gallery is hoping to put together an exhibition of
her final work. Jonah's younger brother Conrad is unaware of the exact
circumstances surrounding his mother's untimely death in a car crash. With a
revealing article about to expose the truth about her 'accident', Jonah and
Gene must decide whether they should tell the disturbed boy about his mother’s
depression before it becomes public knowledge.
Conrad sits
in his darkened room, immersed in violent and fantastical videogames where he
can become any character he likes, or kill people at will. He is withdrawn and
surly, and his father has no idea how to communicate with him. The sadness of
this relationship and the catastrophic ways that Gene tries to learn more about
his son are tempered by some extremely comical moments. With Jonah helping him
to come out of his shell, Conrad blossoms into the film’s raw exposed heart.
Despite
bursts of voiceover from a number of different characters, as well as a complex
chronology that contains flashbacks within flashbacks, it is really Conrad’s
point of view in which we see the world through. His heart on sleeve writings
and curious dancing behind not-so-closed doors make him utterly endearing, even
if he does spit in a teacher’s face in one scene. Memories and dreams of his
mother have a powerful hold on his mind, but it is his fragmented view of the
world that resonates most. Like the flashes of his mother’s photos that we
occasionally see on screen, or the YouTube videos he consumes daily, Conrad is
lost in a disjointed reality, a reality reflected in the inventive structure of
the film.
Getting
under the skin of a few of its characters is daring, but could easily be
accused of a lack of focus. However, Louder Than Bombs has a decent stab at
examining not only three generations of men, but also the woman who affected
their lives in profound ways. All of the film’s flawed characters deliver
moments of heart and humour, but as distressed teen Conrad, it is Devin Druid
who deserves the most praise for his exceptional performance.
Hardcore Henry is an action film completely shot from the first-person point of view of its lead character. Apart from found footage films that use the POV of a character's camera, I think this is probably the first total first-person POV film since Lady in the Lake attempted it in 1947. And Hardcore Henry is a hell of a lot more fun than that.
It's from director Ilya Naishuller who made the music videos I have embedded below. Once you've seen these, you'll have a very good idea of exactly what Hardcore Henry is going to be like. Below these is a snippet of my review of the film.
The titular Henry awakes in a flying laboratory after losing two
limbs and most of his face in some unseen grisly accident. His scientist
wife, Estelle (Bennett), is putting him back together with new robotic
parts when suddenly telekinetic villain Akan (Kozlovsky) bursts in,
kidnaps Henry’s beloved and sends his henchman to hunt and kill poor
Henry. But they’ve underestimated this half-cyborg super-soldier and his
determination to get his wife back, even if he’s running low on power
and hasn’t got any memories of his former life.
Just because films based on video games never work, it doesn’t mean
that cinema can’t have its very own version of a first-person
shoot-‘em-up. Hardcore Henry is so much like playing a video
game, that it feels strange not to have a controller in your hand.
Copley pops up throughout the film as Jimmy to tell Henry/you what the
next mission/level is that needs to be completed. You might find
yourself tilting your head, straining to see what Henry sees from a
clearer angle, or recoiling from the screen as his enemies leap, punch,
kick, and shoot at him. There’s even time for a sniper’s eye view as you
stand on a balcony picking off enemies below you...
