The Auschwitz-Birkenau-set “Son of Saul” opens at the start of a work shift, when a few men with red X’s painted on the backs of their coats herd a large group of new arrivals indoors, reassuring them that they’ll soon be fed and given job assignments. The camp’s newcomers are told to strip and pick up their clothes and belongings after their group shower — from which, of course, they’ll never emerge.
The marked men wait on the other side of the shower door for the screams to stop so they can resume their work as the Sonderkommando, Jews tasked with the grunt labor of carrying out Hitler’s Final Solution.