If you seek a filmmaker to create the fine grain of 20th-century Europe at its most traumatised, you can’t do better than Hungary’s László Nemes. The textures of his grinding Holocaust movie, Son of Saul (2015), are hard to dispel from the mind. His new film is set in a broken Budapest a year after the failed uprising against communism in 1956, and anyone with even a folk memory of the 1950s will recognise the scruffy streets, weathered rooms and dilapidated lifestyle items of that time.
Each corner of the screen is filled with décor, props and clothes that archive austerity –everything flaking or threadless or cast aside. Italian neo-realist pictures actually shot in rundown postwar Europe hardly look more convincing. Nemes and his design team might have mistakenly left in a button or a screw that dates from 1965, but I couldn’t spot it.
Nemes is also no slouch at story ideas, although it has to be said that Orphan does slouch along at times. The director and his co-writer, Clara Royer, tell of a deceptively cherubic 12-year-old called Andor (Bojtorján Barabas) who lives with his shopworker mother in a battered tenement. Andor is relatively uninterested in the lavish violence of the Stalinist rulers in a society where a variety show features a clown garrotting another in a chair. He wants to know what happened to his Jewish dad in the war (a conflict in which more than 550,000 Hungarian Jews were killed) and thinks he must be around somewhere. We stick so close to Andor that the movie fills us with some of that naivety, too.
Andor’s mother, Klára – a Brechtian model of 20th-century endurance played by Andrea Waskovics – survived the round-ups by hiding in the countryside while baby Andor was secreted in an orphanage. So most of the film is a slow-burn reveal of the deal Klára had to make after her husband was taken in the Holocaust – a deal with a very real devil in the form of a sugar daddy called Berend.
Nemes takes us towards folk-tale territory with his creation of Berend, a Pantagruel-like butcher who turns up to reclaim Klára all these years later. Played by the remarkable French actor, Grégory Gadebois, Berend is a heavy-breathing, heavy-lidded, sweating brute, a Tony Soprano without the joyous heart. Yet he’s also the reason Klára and Andor are still around – maybe the reason Andor is around in the first place.
Andor lives frantically off his wits like so many movie youngsters in dire circumstances, but he’s not always the sharpest knife in the box. Sent half-mad by the challenge posed by Berend, he manages to mess up the life of a Jewish girl chum whose brother is on a communist death list. At one point, someone quotes the Torah to note that only children enter the Promised Land, but the children in European movies tend not to tie up problems neatly the way kids in American – and often Asian – movies do. More often, their screw-ups and delusions endure.
But delusions can be a bit static if extended for too long, which is a slight problem for Orphan. Meanwhile, the brooding, immersive, bleakly ironic film is very well shot and graded in a punchy kind of sepia that maybe only film stock can achieve. Scarlet balloons bobble along Budapest streets as people prepare for some communist fiesta, and you can see this as a nod to the scary motif in the It horror franchise if you wish.
Andor and his “new” father circle aggressively round one another for much of the film before a final confrontation involving a gun and a Ferris wheel. If, like me, you’ve never really got your head around the maxim, “Blood is thicker than water”, this film will only muddle the fluids for you. The movie doesn’t really resolve the issue of how biology and cultural heritage should be weighed against each other – but then again, in central Europe, the 20th-century family received such colossal blows, and was plunged into such moral chasms, that oftentimes its roots lie tangled still.
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