‘Orphan’ Review: László Nemes Returns With a Heavy Dose of Sepia-Tinted Childhood Torment
The first thing to know about “Orphan” is that the orphan of the title isn’t really one at all. Twelve-year-old Andor (Bojtorján Barabás) has a mother who is alive and well and present, as much as she can be, while his father is — well, that’s where things get complicated. In his turbulent young mind, however, Andor may as well be alone in the world. In the unforgiving wasteland of 1950s communist Hungary, a country still licking the wounds of a war and a failed revolution, his care appears not to be the first thing on anyone’s mind, and for better or worse, the boy soon comes to trust nobody but himself. It’s a harsh coming-of-age arc that László Nemes’ third feature traces in slow, stately and strangely honey-dipped fashion: an almost unbearably anguished childhood rendered almost numbingly beautiful.
Unbearable anguish amid historical turmoil is familiar territory for Nemes, the Hungarian writer-director whose auspicious, Oscar-winning debut “Son of Saul” plunged viewers into the horrors of Auschwitz with a visceral, destabilizing first-person perspective not previously deployed in Holocaust portrayals on film. Set in a late-imperial Budapest recklessly tipping into the First World War, his disappointing follow-up “Sunset” repeated “Saul’s” immersive formal technique, this time steering a sprawlingly incoherent melodrama. “Orphan” course-corrects to an extent with its more disciplined, emotionally legible narrative, yet while it reunites Nemes with his virtuoso DP Mátyás Erdély, the startling, dynamic visual subjectivity of their previous two collaborations has been largely jettisoned.
In its place is a burnished, distanced pictorialism, achieved in a parched rainbow of browns and tans, that arguably conveys the desolate hunger of working-class life in Budapest in 1957 — one year after a student-led uprising against a Stalinist government was quashed by Soviet forces, and with the cruel impact of the Holocaust still felt in numerous shattered and separated families. Andor’s is one of those. A brief prologue set in 1949 shows the four-year-old boy warily reunited with his mother Klára (Andrea Waskovics), having been handed over to an orphanage in his infancy. Klára, a Jewish woman who spent the Holocaust in hiding while her husband was sent to the camps, has taken time to rebuild her life, yet eight years on, her severed bond with her son has never quite been mended. Often, Andor and Klára stare at each other in mutual, forlorn incomprehension, each seeking and failing to find a mirror in the other’s gaze.
In place of that parental connection, Andor idolizes, idealizes and near-literally worships Klára’s long-absent, presumably late husband — a man he never knew, and to whom he frequently speaks aloud in the formal, reverent manner of prayer. With regard to the boy’s paternity, viewers with at least half a mind on historical dates may soon clock that the math doesn’t entirely check out, which is where Berend (French actor Grégory Gadebois) enters the frame: A brusque, brutish Gentile butcher, he barges into this fragile two-person household with an air of entitlement inexplicable to Andor, who doesn’t know him from Adam. Klára is evasive in explaining their acquaintance, though it gradually emerges that he’s the man who none-too-gently sheltered her in the years after she was separated from her husband. We piece together the truth a little faster than Andor; once he’s caught up, his only recourse is hostile, unbudging denial.
It’s a story of vast, sonorously echoing sadness, apparently rooted in the director’s own family history. Yet as told by Nemes and co-writer Clara Royer, it’s unevenly paced and curiously uninvolving — revealing most of its crucial narrative cards less than halfway through, and more or less running in place thereafter, to duly powerful but stifling effect. Aided by the collapsed grandeur of Márton Ágh’s remarkable production design, “Orphan” is vivid and battering in its depiction of the city as a veritable assault course of everyday horrors, from streetfighting children to violently authoritarian police to so many varieties of abusive civilian men — take any of the film’s exactingly constructed tableaux and you’d scarcely know it’s a post-war piece. But the lives and relationships amid all this textured decay remain thinly and repetitively drawn. If it’s hard not to be moved by the milieu, the film never pulls us in dramatically.
First-time actor Barabás has a lot to shoulder here. He’s blessed with a tense, scrabbling physicality on screen, plus a baby-Brando glower beneath a head of striking blond curls, and Nemes directs him into a stance of braced, vulnerable defensiveness that serves the film’s purposes well — even if his character, too, wants for interior light. The camera loves him, but then Erdély’s camera loves an awful lot here: The film is inarguably handsome, but often so exquisitely lit and composed, in a warm sand-to-rust palette only a few degrees from outright sepia, that it risks connoting a misplaced nostalgia for the worst of times. Where “Son of Saul” barrelled into one waking nightmare with claustrophobic tunnel vision, “Orphan” steps back to gaze upon another. There’s much horror here, and much beauty, but little meaningful tension between the two.
