His debut feature Son of Saul anointed László Nemes as the Béla Tarr heir apparent (challenged, briefly, by Hu Bo, until his death by suicide shortly before the release of his extraordinary An Elephant Sitting Still), but in recent years he’s spurned the title, instead establishing himself as a competent and reliable historical filmmaker. Nemes nevertheless continues to utilize his unblinking, albeit not entirely dispassionate, gaze, focusing it in Orphan on Andor Hirsch, a Jewish child navigating the streets of Budapest in 1957 following a failed uprising against the U.S.S.R. the year prior. Orphan has heavy shades of Rossellini’s Germany, Year Zero, which similarly followed a young boy as he wandered through his war-torn home, but it’s not as lean or livewire as Rossellini’s movie, and it more comfortably resides in the well-worn grooves of the coming-of-age story.
We meet Andor being taken out of an orphanage and into the arms of the mother he doesn’t remember, who abandoned him to survive in the Hungarian countryside during World War II. His father, so he’s told, was deported in 1944. Andor worships his absent father, and often pauses to pray to him for guidance and comfort. Because of this, Orphan feels at times like a spiritual sequel to Son of Saul, and it traverses similar thematic territory: the role of the father-son relationship in men’s lives, and how vociferously one might cling to the sanctity of that relationship, even when it’s fabricated, when it’s tested by the encroaching pressures of fascism. Yet where Son of Saul zeroes in monomaniacally on Saul, and lets actor Géza Röhrig communicate the point through bereft gazes and gestures, Orphan is more patient, more outgoing — not always to its benefit. It follows Andor through a series of vignettes to nowhere in particular, refusing to build momentum. We’ll see a sad Passover seder, an interaction with an underground freedom fighter, a mysterious man on a motorcycle, and a gun discovered under a tree — all pieces of an opaque puzzle that do end up fitting together, yet rarely in a satisfying way: there’s too much zigging and zagging.
But Nemes, going for the hattrick here with cinematographer Mátyás Erdély, pumps out a storm of quietly virtuoso camera moves to make up for the narrative shortcomings. He showers us with painterly compositions and tracking shots; it’s like he can’t help himself, he just has to make beautiful images. On one hand, the camera work can be overbearingly precious: more than one shot through a prismatic keyhole, frames within frames that show the world closing in on a boy with nothing to lose, zooms neatly timed to the quiver of an ambivalent fiddle. On the other hand, it’s mostly productive: the zooms deliver new information, and the tracking shots give us effective in-camera cuts. Nemes is great with limited, bewildered perspectives, and Orphan works when it immerses us in a Budapest seen through a child’s eyes, soaking everything up like a sponge.
About an hour in, Nemes shifts away from his sort-of picaresque structure. Andor’s mother Klára pulls the rug out from under him at the gravesite of his fantasy father: she wanted him to be her dead husband’s son because she never thought the man who sheltered her during the war — his real father, played with convincingly monstrous stepdad energy by Grégory Gadebois — would ever find her. Surprise! He has. From there, an interpersonal war between Andor and his newly discovered father, Berend, breaks out. It’s potentially very knotty stuff, and some real intrigue starts to develop against the painstakingly rendered backdrop of Communist Hungary. Will Andor continue to hate his new father for replacing the old one? Will they eventually warm up to each other? We never get a conclusive answer: Nemes loses the trees for the forest, serving Berend up not as a flesh-and-blood character, but instead as a stand-in for the crimes of Communism. It’s reasonable for filmmakers to have fascism on their minds in 2025 — perhaps even necessary — but it’s so widely portrayed that they have to do something unique with it, and Nemes can’t muster much beyond platitudes.
Throughout Orphan, the director drops hints at the suffocating influence of Communism. “Long Live May 1st“ posters are put up, Klára’s boss listens to Lenin on the radio, and Berend revels in the constraints of the system. “Hooray,” he shouts late in the film, “it’s May Day!” When Nemes lets the Communist workings unravel in the background, it stimulates curiosity, but when he nudges in his own takes on Communist Hungary, it’s hard not to detect some pretention. The film’s final image is so obviously, dully about fascism and its circular nature, that its arrival tastes like a cop-out for neglecting the prickly family dynamic, as Nemes unfortunately orphans the more trenchant story about the nature of fatherhood this could have been.
Published as part of TIFF 2025 — Dispatch 6.
Comments are closed.