The Holocaust has been an ethical and cinematic conundrum for film-makers almost since the camps were liberated 70 years ago. Jean-Luc Godard has often said that the absence of footage of the gas chambers in action marks a signal failure of the 20th century’s signature art form to illuminate the 20th century’s greatest atrocity. Conversely, Claude Lanzmann, who spent decades making Shoah and the ancillary documentaries that have followed it, not only refused for years to countenance the representation of the Holocaust in fictional films (by any film-maker), but even declined to use historical footage in his own work. Instead, he hit the issue literally where it lived: in the memories of its survivors and perpetrators.

Looking at these events face-on involves all manner of risks. Alain Resnais’s Night And Fog tracked the ruins of Auschwitz a decade after it closed, keeping all the horrors in the narration. Schindler’s List, by contrast, showed everything – random murders, the inevitability of the gas chamber, the totality of suffering – but opened itself to accusations of exploitation and, worse, of selling false hope where hope had no business to be found.

That was nothing next to the excrescences that were Life Is Beautiful and Jakob The Liar, which claimed to look yet saw nothing beyond banality, kitsch and false comfort. And The Grey Zone, the gruesome gas chamber melodrama, made obscene because of the number of Hollywood stars so eager to be involved. Even the usually sure-footed Gillo Pontecorvo failed to distinguish himself with his 1960 sonderkommando movie Kapò.

So: to look, or not to look? László Nemes’s Son Of Saul splits the difference: we look at a man who is looking at the black heart of the thing, a doleful Hungarian sonderkommando named Saul (Géza Röhrig) escorting his fellow Jews to the gas chamber in order, perhaps, to delay his own appointment with it. The camera remains on his face in close-up for almost the entire movie, as grim events unfold before him; events we sometimes see but mostly feel second-hand and, thanks to the movie’s meticulous sound design, also hear in horrifying detail. Nemes obviously pondered his indirect approach deeply before proceeding with this, his debut, and the results are enough to have impressed Lanzmann himself, who has praised it effusively.

Not that the movie doesn’t struggle under the weight of its own horrors and the grotesque dilemmas facing Saul, but the point is it abuses neither history, memory, nor the audience itself. That may be a welcome first in Holocaust dramas.