It remains an open question throughout “Orphan” whether the 12-year-old Andor (Bojtorján Barabas) is lucky, as the woman who finds him hiding in some brush at the beginning of Laszlo Nemes’ gripping third feature says as she prepares to reunite him with his mother Klara (Andrea Waskovics). After the Nazis ran through Budapest and Hungary subsequently fell under Communist rule, leaving broken families in their wake amidst the physical ruins of World War II, many children had no parents to return to. But as the woman insists, Andor at least has has a home, albeit a half-empty one when his father Hirsch’s last known whereabouts were the concentration camps and though his ultimate fate may be unknown but can be reasonably assumed after a decade by Klara, it isn’t accepted by Andor, who has to imagine his father can still be alive when he is never confirmed to be dead.
If Nemes showed in grim, unrelenting detail what fate Hirsch likely met in the camps in his landmark debut “Son of Saul,” “Orphan” can be considered a proper follow-up in a variety of respects after the director’s second feature “Sunset” dipped back further into the past before World War I to show how international conflicts would radically change Hungarian society. While that film may have felt a bit beholden to the single-take style that made his debut so immersive — the devout student of cinema surely heeding Godard’s maxim that “every cut is a lie” — this chronological successor reaffirms its director as a generational talent when it seems as ambitious in a different direction than just its technical prowess, tackling the abstract drama of confronting the psychological impact such disappearances as Hirsch had on the generation that followed.
The director’s brilliant sense for cinema is immediate from the film’s opening shot in which the child’s heavy breathing from running to hide, looking out through a hole in the shrubs from his perspective can appear as if he’s emerging from the womb. In fact, Andor’s an innocent, though his face constantly caked with dirt when no one is ever around to look after him would suggest otherwise and the mud has a way of building up to become something impenetrable both internally and externally as few are willing to share details about Hirsch, either because they’re too busy or want to spare him more pain at a young age. Andor doesn’t have much time to spend on a daily basis with Klara, who spends her days working at a grocery before collapsing into bed at night, and he is frequently shooed away by Geza, a local entertainer who knew Hirsch before he was hauled away yet whose theater isn’t really a place for children. Andor’s primary companion is Sari (Elíz Szabó), a girl his own age, but that’s only when he can find her, being just as squirrely as he is and with good reason to sneak off when she brings supplies to her older brother Tamás (Soma Sándor), who ran afoul of Soviet authorities and hides in the basement of a building that patrolling officers only visit to relieve themselves.
Andor is too young to entirely know that he is likely to be a constant suspect of the state a few years on as Tamás is, but he certainly can sense the atmosphere of fear around him and lives in the terror of uncertainty, aggravated personally by the sudden arrival of Berend (Grégory Gadebois), a man who sneaks into his house late one night to see Klara, who in turn remains vague about who he is when pressed. Eventually, the boorish man is revealed to be a butcher who spared Klara’s life by taking her in when the Soviets swept through Budapest in exchange for a sexual relationship. Nemes and co-writer Clara Royer are wise not to make Berend, a monster though he cuts that figure as a professional butcher and a relatively good heart is hidden beneath both pride and a certain level of entitlement when he’s of the right bloodline for survival’s sake, preventing his best efforts to endear himself to Andor. He isn’t set up for any success on this front by Klara, who feels equal parts shame and obligation in continuing to put up with him given what he did for her, and the drama exposes how even the closest of families could be doomed without a foundation of trust to build on with the amount of information they withheld from one another either out of misguided compassion or self-protection.
When someone offers “to keep this between us” as a secret, the generosity of the gesture is understood, but more deeply felt is the surely devastating results of depriving someone else close of that knowledge, leaving them to endlessly question why things are the way they are. As “Orphan” wears on, it becomes tremendously powerful to learn its title isn’t referencing Andor alone, but everyone bedeviled by what they feel they can and can’t share with others in a time of state-instigated paranoia and for as many staggering images Nemes delivers with his longtime cinematographer Matyas Erdely including a stunner of a closing shot, it’s how the director illuminates what could be instead of what is that resonates the most.
“Orphan” does not yet have U.S. distribution.