The only other Lázló Nemes that’s come my way previously is SON OF SAUL (2015) and I didn’t go see it because I didn’t have the stomach for another Holocaust film. Had I read more about ORPHANS before the screening, I might also have given it a miss. But I’m glad I didn’t. It’s the story of a young boy in Hungary who starts off as an orphan in the aftermath of WWII only to have his mother – a Jewish woman who’d had him while in hiding – claim him as the film begins. His mother’s husband has not returned from the camps. Almost a decade later, in the aftermath of the failed Hungarian Revolution of 1956, in a city in rubble and in the grip of Soviet repressive forces, the boy still descends to the bowels of his apartment building to converse with this spectral father daily, confessing his daily life and almost worshipping this lost paragon of virtue, talismanically holding on to his notebooks written in a Hebrew the child himself can’t decipher, going to synagogue to try to reconnect with these people and this culture that have survived the latest attempt at extinction and now have to figure out how to survive the present. But was that absent saint really his father or is it the brutal butcher who was paid to save his mother but ended up abusing her then and now?

ORPHANS is a complex story of identity, history, family; of finding you are part of what you most hate. The young boy played by Bojtorján Barábas, beautiful but full of resentment and rage, a perpetual outsider, constantly having the ground pulled from under him, is I suppose a metaphor for Hungary in this period. It’s all secrets and lies, power ploys and powerlessness, rebellion stifled and defeated, the ruins of bombed out streets and the long queues in the grocery stores. The lighting, by Mátyás Erdély, is beautiful, classic, we see a textured almost glossy image that emphasizes the beauty of the people in the rubble of their surroundings, with people often shot through fences, gaps, windows. The place is ruined by its history, the people oppressed and secretive, having to get on their knees and plead for basic decency. It’s a place where one can’t bring oneself to kill the father and yet if one doesn’t one must bow down to the hateful power of the brutish, the petty and the authoritarian. Some people have found it boring. THE GUARDIAN tellingly misquotes the central line in the film, when it claims, the mother tells the boy, ‘the more you hate him, the more you like him’, whereas it should be ‘the more you hate him the more you BECOME like him’. A considerable difference in meaning. At the end the boy is reunited with both parents but now orphaned from safety, security, love, and even his culture. His father, like his government and the society he lives in, has become the enemy; and he is trapped amongst them in a prison that outwardly looks colourful, exciting and secure. I loved it, even though I’m sure some of the symbols and metaphors would be more clearly accessible to a Hungarian audience than to myself. Grégory Gadebois is magnificent as the butcher.