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One expects the Hungarian drama "Son of Saul" to be grim, solely because it's set in Auschwitz in 1944, at the worst depths of the Holocaust.

What one doesn't expect is how intensely paced, artfully crafted, humanizing and heartbreaking director László Nemes' stunning feature debut is.

Saul Ausländer (played by Géza Röhrig) is a "sonderkommando" — one of the Jews working in the death chambers, buying another day of survival by reluctantly carrying out the orders of their German captors. He helps direct new arrivals to the "showers," as the guards bark out instructions, along with the reassuring order to remember the number of the hook on which they hung their clothes, so they can retrieve them later.

It's all a lie, of course. These people aren't coming out of the gas chamber alive. The moment the doors are closed, Saul and his fellow workers, with a sad efficiency, are clearing the hooks and loading the belongings onto carts for sorting.

Cinematographer Mátyás Erdély's camera is trained tightly on Saul through every step of this process. The victims are in the background, out of focus, their deaths predetermined by the Nazis' cruel machinery of death. Saul sees it all, from the stacks of luggage that are emptied for hidden jewelry to the stacks of bodies hauled to the incinerators.

Among the dead, though, he discovers a sign of life. A young boy is still breathing, barely. In fact, he doesn't live for more than a few minutes after his removal from the gas chamber. But in that time, rightly or wrongly, Saul comes to believe that the boy is his son.

Saul is told to take the boy's body to the Nazi doctors for an autopsy before he's incinerated with the other victims, but decides to do something else: He aims to find a rabbi so the boy can be given a proper Jewish burial. Saul's mission is risky, even more as his fellow sonderkommandos are planning an uprising. (There was such an uprising in Auschwitz, on Oct. 7, 1944. The fact that Auschwitz wasn't liberated until 1945, with the end of World War II, tells you how successful this uprising was.)

By following Saul, the camera trained on his sullen face or the red X on the back of his jacket, Nemes and co-writer Clara Royer show us the horrors of Auschwitz through his perspective. The fact that Saul doesn't dwell on the mass death going on all around him, that it becomes background noise as he moves with determination, is more disturbing than depicting it directly. The worst part of the Holocaust, Nemes suggests, is that it was so overwhelming that the only way to survive it was to tune it out.

Names entrusts this message to Röhrig, a Hungarian-born poet and kindergarten teacher living in New York with minimal acting experience. In spite of this, or maybe because of it, Röhrig gives an intense, yet perfectly understated, performance. Saul remains seemingly emotionless as he moves through the camp, but there is a potent mix of emotions — grief, anger, fear and, most surprising, hope — just under the surface.

"Son of Saul" — which won the Golden Globe in the foreign-language category and is favored to repeat that feat at the Oscars — is not a movie to be viewed lightly. It is a searing depiction of the Holocaust, a work whose deep emotional impact will remain with a viewer long after seeing it.

Twitter: @moviecricket —

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'Son of Saul'

A Jewish laborer in Auschwitz goes on a desperate search for redemption in this intense drama from Hungary.

Where • Broadway Centre Cinemas.

When • Opens today.

Rating • R for disturbing violent content and some graphic nudity.

Running time • 107 minutes; in Hungarian and other languages, with subtitles.