‘Orphan,’ the new film by László Nemes, tells a bleak story of a Jewish boy in 1950s Budapest

László Nemes burst onto the international movie scene with this first feature film, Son of Saul (2015), which told the story of a member of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz, the unit tasked with disposing the millions of murdered bodies at the death camp.

It subverted every cliché of Holocaust filmmaking up to that point. Where most Holocaust dramas were slow-paced, and some, like Schindler’s List, even featured tasteful black-and-white cinematography and dialogue in English (one of the only European languages not spoken by a sizable percentage of death-camp inmates), Son of Saul went for grueling realism.

The movie is in color, and the Sonderkommando work at breakneck speed, as we know they were required to do from accounts of the few survivors.

But it had a deep emotional core, about a man who is shaken out of the numbness he has used to protect himself when he goes on a doomed quest to give a proper burial to a murdered boy he claims is his son.

It was such a perfectly conceived and realized movie that it won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, as well as the Grand Prix at Cannes, and dozens of other awards.

Few have ever made such a great film, and expectations were understandably, perhaps unfairly, high for Nemes’s subsequent movies. His follow-up feature, Sunset, was far more modest, and now he has a new film, Orphan, which opens Thursday in Israel.

'Orphan' is set on the backdrop of a crushed student uprising

Although it is set after the war, Orphan references the war in nearly every disconsolate frame, and captures the melancholy of trying to pick up the pieces after a tragedy of such a grand scale.

Much like Son of Saul, it subverts the cliches of stories about boys searching for their true father and wishing that this father was a great hero. Based on the story of Nemes’s own father, it is about a 12-year-old boy named Andor (Bojtorján Barabás) in Budapest in 1957.

A student uprising against the Stalinist regime was just crushed by the Soviets, and it’s a bleak, hopeless setting, which mirrors the bleakness of Andor’s life.

He is not an actual orphan but is one of the luckier Jewish children who survived the war in an orphanage and was reunited after the war with one parent, his mother, Klára (Andrea Waskovics). His father, Hirsch, whom he has always been told was a brave and brilliant man, perished in a death camp.

Andor treasures every scrap of information about his father, and clings to a vain hope that he might not really have died. He needs this fantasy about his father to help him get through his days.

His mother works in a state-run shop and barely has enough money for food. Just as bad, from her son’s point of view, she is depressed and careworn, with barely any energy for him. Andor spends much of his time avoiding bullies and trying various schemes to make a little money with his one trustworthy friend.

When a crude, obnoxious gentile butcher, Berend (Grégory Gadebois), who turns out to be not only rude but violent, rides up to their building on a motorcycle, acting like he owns Klára, Andor knows that their already struggling family is in even worse trouble.

'Orphan' has stylistic similarties to earlier works

Gradually, what we sense from this butcher’s first appearance becomes clear to Andor. Klára’s first husband may well have been a murdered hero, but it seems likely that Berend is Andor’s real father. It turns out that this married butcher hid Klára during the war and forced her into a sexual relationship.

She managed to escape his clutches once the war ended, but now that he has found her, he still considers her his, and wants her back, along with the boy he thinks of as his son.

Not only does his reappearance shatter Andor’s fantasies about his father, but it presents him with a terrifying problem: He must contend with this violent man who wants to come and live with him and Klára.

In Hungary in this period, there is nowhere for Klára to turn for help, especially since Berend is buddies with many of the local Communist Party functionaries.

The movie has some stylistic similarities with another, very different portrait of a troubled childhood, Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, especially in its refusal to sentimentalize anything. Childhood is a time when children are at the mercy of the adults around them and have no one to turn to if those adults are brutal or neglectful.

Andor is not in a concentration camp, like Saul in Son of Saul, but he lives in a reality where he may be a victim of violence at any moment. Orphan vividly portrays that climate of fear.

Unbearable tension with no hope for anything better

While no movie could be harder to watch than Son of Saul, in some ways, somehow Orphan makes you long to flee the theater more than Son of Saul does. The bleakness of Andor’s life is so relentless, I found myself wishing the movie would end long before it did.

Son of Saul teased us with the promise that Saul would find some small measure of redemption in the end, and showed that he had achieved a kind of grace just by choosing to try to bury his son.

Here, there is absolutely no glimmer of hope, and nearly every scene involving Berend has the unbearable tension of a family gathering ready to explode into brutality, even death.

Cinematographer Mátyás Erdély has done a brilliant job of making the sepia-toned photography mirror the emotional barrenness of the world that Andor inhabits.

The cast is excellent, and Gadebois manages the almost impossible feat of giving us some glimpses of the butcher’s humanity: Despite his flaws, he does care for Klara and wants to raise this boy. But while Truffaut gave us hints that his abused hero would find a way out, Nemes gives us no such comfort.