With the biggest budget ever given to a Hungarian movie, Lajos Koltai went about taking Imre Kertesz's novel to the big screen with fervour. The story follows fourteen-year-old Hungarian Jew Gyorgy Koves (Nagy) as he is taken from his bus and put on a train to Buchenwald concentration camp where we see how he changes from a naive child to a broken adult. Koltai takes us step by painful step as we follow Gyorgy through exhaustion, starvation, dejection and misery (the maggot worming its way out of his open wound is one of the worst squeamish moments). Cinematographer Gyala Pados has shot a beautiful looking film, drenched in warm sepia tones and dark shadows, that would impress even the great Gordon Willis, and, as the action gets more grim as the minutes tick by, Pados washes the screen so the warmth transfers into a sickly brown. It can be argued that Koltai and Pados concentrated too much on how the film looks as at times the beauty of the shot undermined the horror within and at 140 minutes, can be accused of outstaying their welcome. Koltai also has an annoying habit of fading to black in almost every scene which disrupts the pacing and narrative flow and at times his timeline jump cuts, when he is painstaking deliberate for most of the film, are intrusive. But this is nitpicking as Koltai, knowing that holocaust movies have been done before, dispenses with the usual Nazi sadistic commanders (in fact the Germans have a small screen presence throughout) and instead keeps the camera trained on the brilliant Nagy.
