Orphan
In Orphan, László Nemes fixes his unsparing gaze on 1957 Budapest, a city still raw from the crushed uprising against Soviet rule and haunted by the ghosts of the Holocaust. The story follows Andor (Bojtorján Barábas), a Jewish boy whose mother, Klára (Andrea Waskovics), has raised him on tales of his noble, deceased father. That fragile myth collapses when Berend (Grégory Gadebois), a coarse, menacing butcher from the countryside, appears claiming paternity with dubious intent. The setting is crucial: post-uprising Budapest lies under the weight of Soviet repression, but an even darker shadow is cast by the unresolved trauma of the previous decade. What makes Orphan unsettlingly fresh is its refusal to present Holocaust survival as a simple tale of solidarity. Nemes instead depicts it as transactional, even exploitative – a brutal wartime economy of power in which the help Klára received came at a terrible cost. The film peels away the sentimental fairytales of rescue to reveal something murkier.
At its heart, though, this is a story of a child grasping at adulthood before his time. Barábas is extraordinary in restraint: the furrowed eyebrows, the earnest attempts to shoulder responsibility, and the awkward gestures that fall somewhere between play-acting and maturity. He drinks, he plots, and he even boards a train in a child’s imitation of independence – gestures both heartbreaking and precarious, showing a childhood already squeezed by history. Yet more often than not, the scenes are dominated by Gadebois. His butcher looms with a grotesque physicality: the swaggering gait, the booming bellow, and the heavy-lidded, calculating gaze. His violence and vitality coexist uneasily; each display of his formidable strength and skill with handling meat, tools, and the people around him heightens the almost fantastical menace he radiates.
The film reaches its climax on a small, pale Ferris wheel, its two rattling cars cutting through the night like a grotesque parody of the American dream. Orphan may be Nemes’s bleakest vision yet: a childhood eclipsed, a past unresolved, a desolate future dangling by a thread. In its unflinching attention to history’s shadows, the film emerges as a haunting portrait of inheritance – of generational trauma and of innocence cut down before it has the chance to bloom.
Christina Yang
Orphan does not have a release date yet.
Read more reviews from our Venice Film Festival coverage here.
For further information about the event, visit the Venice Film Festival website here.
Watch a clip from Orphan here:
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