By Sam Ben-Meir in New York
We live in an age of constant emergency. War footage scrolls past breakfast tables. Climate disasters arrive with seasonal regularity. Economic systems reward acceleration even as they hollow out the conditions of life. We are told, daily, that we are approaching—or already over—a precipice. And yet meaning feels strangely unavailable. We know too much, and act too little. Awareness proliferates; judgment withers.
Few works of art are equipped to address this condition honestly. Most rush to reassure us: with hope, with heroes, with the promise that if we endure long enough, things will turn out all right. But there is one film that refuses reassurance altogether—and in doing so, speaks uncannily to our moment: Son of Saul.
Released in 2015 and set almost entirely within Auschwitz, Son of Saul (directed by László Nemes) is not a Holocaust film in the conventional sense. It does not aim to explain history, educate through narrative, or redeem suffering through moral uplift. Instead, it places the viewer inside a world where the very conditions for meaning have been shattered—and asks what ethics can survive when consolation has become a lie.
One of the film’s most striking features is how little it allows us to see. The camera stays tight to Saul Ausländer’s body—his shoulder, his neck, his ear—while the surrounding world remains blurred. At the same time, sound overwhelms the senses: screams, orders, gunshots, machinery. Violence happens mostly offscreen, but it is everywhere.
This is not a stylistic gimmick. It is an argument.
In an age like ours—saturated with images, data, and instant analysis—we often assume that clarity comes from seeing more. If only we had the full picture, the right dashboard, the right report, we could act wisely. Son of Saul dismantles that fantasy. The blur tells us something uncomfortable: total vision is not neutral. It can be a form of domination. To see everything is to risk turning the world into an object.
The film suggests that when reality becomes machinery—when death is organized, optimized, made efficient—stepping back for a panoramic view does not liberate us. It implicates us. Moral clarity, paradoxically, may require less vision, not more.
This is uncannily familiar today. We scroll endlessly through crises we cannot meaningfully address. The result is not ethical awakening, but numbness. Son of Saul names this condition without flattering it.
Saul is a member of the Sonderkommando, a group of Jewish prisoners forced to assist in the machinery of extermination: ushering victims into gas chambers, removing bodies, cleaning floors, feeding ovens. The film does not explain this role pedagogically. Although the film opens with a brief definition of the Sonderkommando, this gesture does not function as explanation so much as abandonment: the audience is told what these units were and then left alone with what that knowledge cannot resolve.
That refusal matters. Saul’s predicament is not meant to reassure us that “we would have acted differently.” On the contrary, it confronts us with a more disturbing truth: complicity does not always come from evil intent. Often it comes from procedure.
Saul survives by participating. He does not choose the system, but he inhabits it. There is no clean outside. That is why his situation feels so unsettlingly contemporary. We, too, live inside systems we did not design and cannot easily escape; fossil fuel economies, global supply chains built on exploitation, digital platforms that monetize attention and outrage. Our comforts are purchased through distant harms. Like Saul, we are not executioners—but neither are we innocent spectators.
Son of Saul does not accuse us. It does something more demanding: it shows what it means to live ethically when there is no position of purity. The film’s narrative turns on Saul’s fixation with burying a single boy he believes to be his son according to Jewish ritual law. Whether the boy is actually his son is never confirmed. That ambiguity is crucial. Saul’s mission is not psychological closure. It is not about personal healing.
It is also not resistance in any strategic sense. Saul’s efforts do not save anyone. They disrupt a planned uprising. They endanger others. They ultimately fail. And yet the film insists—quietly, relentlessly—that this act matters.
Why?
Because it refuses to let annihilation be total.
Saul’s burial is not redemptive. It does not transform the system. It does not produce hope. What it does is mark a limit: this body will not be reduced to ash without a name, without a rite, without a final gesture that says: you do not get everything.
This is where Son of Saul speaks most powerfully to our moment. We are trained to ask of every action: does it work? Does it scale? Does it change outcomes? When the answers are uncertain, we retreat into cynicism or despair.
Saul offers a different ethic: fidelity without guarantees. You act not because you will win, but because allowing the system to define what counts as meaningful action would be the final defeat.
Many Holocaust films offer consolation, even if indirectly: moments of rescue, flashes of hope, the survival of a witness. Son of Saul refuses this. Even its final scene—often misread as hopeful—resists closure. The appearance of a boy at the end—expressionless, unreadable—is not promise; and Saul’s brief smile does not redeem the world or announce a future. Neither face offers a sign. What appears vanishes almost immediately, leaving no future intact.
This refusal matters because we live in a culture addicted to consolation. We want narratives that tell us suffering will be redeemed, that progress will resume, that history bends toward justice if we are patient enough. But what if patience is part of the problem?
Son of Saul suggests that there are moments when endurance becomes complicity—when “holding on” simply allows the machine to keep running. In such moments, ethics does not consist in hope, but in refusal: refusing to let horror become normal, refusing to let death become administrative, refusing to let meaning be outsourced to systems that do not care whether anything breathes.
This is not despair. It is severity. The film’s most unsettling lesson is that meaning does not collapse because people stop believing. It collapses because the world is reorganized to make belief irrelevant. In Auschwitz, bodies become inventory. Death becomes throughput. Ritual becomes obstruction.
Today, different systems perform similar work. Markets convert value into price. Algorithms convert attention into metric. Climate collapse converts living ecosystems into “externalities” and “risk factors.” War converts civilians into “collateral.”
The danger is not catastrophe alone, but the normalization of catastrophe. When disaster becomes background noise, conscience adapts. We cope. We manage. We survive. Son of Saul stages a refusal of that adaptation. Saul does not restore meaning. He prevents its total erasure. He does not overcome horror. He denies it the last word.
Using Son of Saul to critique our moment is not about drawing easy parallels. The Holocaust is singular. But the film’s ethical logic is transferable.
It asks us:
What will you refuse to let be absorbed?
What will you insist remains sacred, even if that insistence changes nothing?
What will you do when hope becomes a technology of delay?
In an age hurtling toward ecological and political collapse, these questions matter more than optimism. They demand forms of life capable of withstanding what we already know.
Son of Saul does not give us a program. It gives us a posture: fidelity without consolation, action without victory, responsibility without purity. That posture may be the only one left to us. Not because it will save the world. But because it refuses to let the world become nothing but a machine.
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San Ben-Meir is an assistant adjunct professor of philosophy at City University of New York, College of Technology.