Immaculate and inert, “Orphan” plays like a Spruce Goose power ballad too leaden to lift. Premiering at the Venice Film Festival, László Nemes’ period epic glows with honey and moves like molasses, opening a gilded (and glacial) window into 1950s Budapest, impressing by scale and scope while leaving little else to latch onto. All the same, the film marks a curious change of pace for our youngest Old Master – a one-time Béla Tarr protégé who emerged fully formed and out of nowhere, announcing himself as a formidable talent with his feature debut, “Son of Saul.”
That 2015 Cannes-turned-Oscar winner cut a new path through darkness by emphasizing radical subjectivity, resolving longstanding tensions about aestheticizing the Holocaust by focusing on one man’s intense and acute first-person experience of Auschwitz. Nemes’ formal bet clearly paid off – so much so that he attempted to replicate it on an even grander scale with his 2018 end-of-the-old-world follow-up, “Sunset.” Only there he went bust, setting the stage, perhaps, for an art-house rebrand.
Enter “Orphan.”
Centering on questions of legacy and paternity – of nature versus nurture, in other words – Nemes’ latest film unfolds as an intensely aestheticized experience, a gold-hued tableau that treats the old Every Frame a Painting adage as a challenge to meet, 24 times a second. Echoing its own narrative, which follows a young boy torn between two radically different father figures, “Orphan” ultimately works best as a kind of formal-pivot sizzle reel, trading the narrow depths of field and skillfully wrought chaos of Nemes’ earlier work for a sweeping, storybook style more evocative of Guillermo del Toro than anyone else.
Well, almost anyone. For at heart this is also a boy’s-own adventure about an urchin coming of age in a sprawling, sinister world, staged at great scale on Central European backlots. Which makes “Orphan” an unexpected companion to Roman Polanski’s “Oliver Twist,” of all things. Mind you, the comparison flatters Polanski far more than Nemes, who never quite manages to thread his own torrid fable with the same wonder, whimsy, melancholy, and malice common to all the films the Hungarian filmmaker so clearly looked to for inspiration.
We follow 12-year-old Andor (Bojtorján Barabas) as he crisscrosses 1950s Budapest, a city scarred by the genocide not a decade prior and still reeling from the failed anti-Soviet uprising of the previous year. Born — so far as he can tell — to Jewish parents, the boy also inherits the fresh weight of their historical trauma. His mother, Klára (Andrea Waskovics), now lives with survivor’s guilt, while his father, Hirsch (played by no one), never lived long enough to share it. What’s a boy to do but take to the streets, and shuls and squats of his hometown, trying to make sense of the wider world and his place therein.
But little is ever settled in a Mitteleuropa metropolis still struggling to redefine itself. The remaining Jewish families hold their city at arm’s length, unsure whether to fully reclaim it or to sever the bond by springing for a one-way ticket west. Meanwhile, the last remaining radicals – nearly all of them students – find themselves picked off one by one as communist authorities snuff out the last embers of the dashed 1956 revolution.
Though the style shifts, Nemes retains the blinkered POV of his earlier work. We see the world through Andor’s bemusement, explaining the choice to leave certain narrative elements opaque, but not odd lack any tonal variance, at least until the bulldog butcher Berend (Gregory Gadebois) muscles into the story, brandishing disturbingly credible claims of paternity.
Berend’s a lout, certainly, but also the man who hid Klára during the war. A lush, yes, but also a native Magyar whose name could grant the boy social acceptance and the family a new kind of stability otherwise out of reach. All things considered, Andor could do worse for a surrogate father – especially one who might be his biological pop as well. After all, it’s not like the lug’s a killer. Or is he? And just what happened to the butcher’s previous child?
Nemes never tips his hand, focusing instead on the boy’s uncertainty as this boisterous intruder takes root in his daily life. Drawn in part from the filmmaker’s own family history, “Orphan” pivots from a picture-book of midcentury malaise to a sepia-polished fairy tale, otherwise lacking magic and majesty. Once more it strikes the same somber note again and again as it follows a boy’s first, faltering encounter with the ogre now calling himself Dad.
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