How architect Laszlo Rajk designed the crematorium set for Holocaust drama Son of Saul
The film doesn’t show much of Rajk’s set but it was essential in setting the mood of the story set in the Nazi death camp
Many things are visible in Son of Saul, the harrowing Oscar-nominated film set in a crematorium at Auschwitz. There is the dead-eyed stare of the protagonist, Saul (played by Geza Rohrig), a Hungarian man who, as a Sonderkommando, is a prisoner forced to do the Nazis’ dirty work for them. And there are the moments of abject horror: anonymous bodies pushed into ovens and people shot in front of pits.
Less visible is the thoughtfully constructed set. For the duration of Son of Saul, the film keeps its focus on Saul; the environment barely reveals itself at the edge of the frame. But the set, designed by Hungarian architect Laszlo Rajk, was essential to the film’s taut energy.
Long takes – some of which were three and four minutes long and accomplished with a hand-held camera – meant that many of the sets needed to be complete rooms that could accommodate 360-degree shooting. This required Rajk to re-create a Nazi crematorium in an abandoned 1912 warehouse on the outskirts of Budapest so that director Laszlo Nemes could follow his character with the camera from gas chamber to incineration spaces in continuous shots.
Auschwitz is a subject Rajk (pronounced Roik) knows well. He designed the Hungarian exhibition at Auschwitz in 2014 and first visited the camp as a university student in the late 1960s, before recent restoration work and more high-tech exhibitions had been added.
“It was the poverty of communism,” he says. “All of these things were run-down. In a way, the atmosphere was much closer to the atmosphere of a death camp.”