Orphan

The picture looks terrific: the scars and ravages of the postwar period are everywhere, and there’s an oily quality to the light that feels bleakly authentic. But the story, with its cycles of rage and violence, runs out of momentum.

The story leans on tropes even as it confronts moral knots. Still, Nemes is the rare filmmaker who deals with those at all — one unafraid of gravity in our perilously glib times.

Perhaps the portrayal of Andor’s father is a bit too villainous at times, morphing him into a sort of caricature. Then again, it is a film told through a child’s eyes after all: a poignant, affecting tale of neglect and resilience.

It remains a valuable work precisely because Nemes films the postwar period not as reconstruction, but as a tainted emotional inheritance, a world where no one truly emerges unscathed. [Full review in Spanish]