Árva
László Nemes (2025)
When a filmmaker gives an audience advance notice of how to look at his work, you’re bound to wonder if he’s anxious the work doesn’t speak for itself. Introducing Orphan in NFT1 at the London Film Festival, László Nemes encouraged us to see the film not as ‘a historical reconstruction’, rather as ‘an individual’s story’. Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive, though – as Nemes proved in his multi-award-winning debut feature, Son of Saul (2015), where the lead performance and distinctive camerawork combined to deliver a powerful character study within a highly specific, grimly detailed historical context. Nemes told the story almost entirely from Saul’s point of view, as almost literally expressed in DP Mátyás Erdély’s visuals. In his next film, Sunset (2018), a different kind of historical drama, Nemes used a more conventionally objective narrative, and the result was disappointing. So is Orphan (as it happens, I saw it seven years to the day after seeing Sunset at an LFF screening). Nemes doesn’t want, or isn’t able, to fuse what’s going on inside the young title character’s head with coherent storytelling. Despite a core idea that’s simple and potentially strong, the writer-director and Clara Royer, who again shares the screenplay credit with him, fragment the narrative – a technique that doesn’t illuminate the protagonist and which is sometimes confusing.
A crucial feature of Nemes’ third feature is that the title is a misnomer. In a prologue, set in 1949, the main character, a Jewish boy called Andor, is reclaimed by his mother, Klára (Andrea Waskovics), from the orphanage in which it appears she placed her infant son, for his own protection, a few years earlier. The main action takes place in Budapest in 1957, the year after the failed Hungarian Uprising. Andor (Bojtorján Barabas) is now twelve years old. Although Klára’s husband is presumed to have died in a Nazi concentration camp towards the end of World War II, Andor not only idealises the father he doesn’t remember but is reluctant to admit he’s no longer alive. As Saul in the earlier Nemes film developed an obsessive, irrational belief that he had a son, so Andor mythicises an absent father – and regularly talks to him (as a Christian boy of Andor’s generation might have talked to his Heavenly Father). In the 1949 prologue, the young child Andor (Tibor Martin Loppert) doesn’t want to leave his hiding place in the orphanage gardens, and that predicts his mindset throughout the story. Andor’s refusal to accept what he’s repeatedly told to accept, intensifies with the emergence of brutish, physically abusive Berend (Grégory Gadebois). When her husband was deported during the war, Klára survived by taking refuge in Berend’s home. He is Andor’s biological father, now hellbent on asserting his paternity and creating a family unit with Klára and Andor, as forcefully as need be.
Bojtorján Barabas has a heavy load for a child actor to shoulder. It takes a while to adjust to his voice, which hasn’t quite broken and, early on, is hard to distinguish from female voices on the soundtrack – those of his mother and of Elza (Hermina Fátyol), her colleague in the grocer’s shop where Klára works. Barabas does well, though you’re always conscious that he’s acting – which isn’t the case with some of the adults in the film. As Berend, Grégory Gadebois is not just an intimidating presence but fearlessly repulsive. Nemes seems to be overdoing it making Berend a butcher by profession, but Gadebois, to his credit, shows him proper sympathy – enough to make understandable, if never likeable, Berend’s stubborn insistence on bending Andor to his will. Understandable is not the word for the film’s subplots and, as a result, characters involved in them, like Andor’s friend Sári (Elíz Szabó) and her brother Tamás (Soma Sándor), an activist in the recent uprising and who’s in hiding from the authorities. According to Klára, her husband Hirsch used to work at the box office in the local Yiddish theatre; the Polish actor Marcin Czarnak (who also appeared in Son of Saul and Sunset) makes a strong impression in his small role as Hirsch’s friend from those days.
Andor’s traumatic discovery, and the family secret at the heart of the film, are supposedly inspired by the experiences in post-war Budapest of Laszlo Nemes’ own father, which may partly explain the director’s claim to have told ‘an individual’s story’. Once you’ve seen Orphan, though, Nemes’ implication that such a story is somehow separable from its historical context, is even more puzzling. He not only describes time and place in an essentially realistic way. He also has the characters’ situations resonate with Hungary’s relationship with the Soviet Union during and after the Second World War. Russian forces liberated Budapest in 1945 and crushed the anti-Soviet uprising in 1956; Klára owes her life and her child’s life to Berend, who’s now ready to tyrannise her and Andor. The grocery store where she and Elza work was once owned by the latter’s Jewish family; its new, Stalinist owner (Konrád Quintus) despises his Jewish employees. The film’s finale takes place at a funfair. While his mother waits below, Andor goes on the big wheel with Berend. High above the ground, the boy pulls a gun on the father that he doubly, deeply resents. (Andor originally found the gun by chance; having given the weapon to Tamás, he later reclaims it.) The funfair climax is certainly suspenseful to watch, until the moment you realise Andor won’t pull the trigger. This is no doubt meant to reflect the 1957 reality of Hungary’s uneasy, uncertain future, behind the Iron Curtain, with its Soviet oppressor. Yet the final non-event isn’t a convincing expression of Andor’s impulsive personality: he would have fired the gun. Orphan‘s symbolic conclusion subjugates an individual’s character to the political history from which their story derives.
16 October 2025
