There are boilerplate audience-unfriendly films, and then there is Laszlo Nemes’Orphan, arguably the most audience-unfriendly film of all time or certainly of the 21st Century…a bitter, taste-of-ashes, morally appalling, end-of-decency film that will make your hair follicles stand at attention.
And yet — here’s the rub — Orphan is an Olympian achievement —- a paralyzing tale about hard-knocks survival —- a devastating, coming-of-age arthouse saga — an undeniably staggering drama of a very high order.
Nemes (Son of Saul) is a masterful, pulverizing filmmaker
Set in 1957 Budapest in the wake of the Hungarian revolt against Soviet domination, it’s an utterly first-rate, grimmer-than-grim tale about a young lad gripped by nihilistic rage and, goaded by an oppressively evil situation concerning his terrified, traumatized mother and an evil, grotesquely fat butcher, a growing inclination for self-destruction.
And yet it ends on a note of mixed (make that extremely mixed) note of roundabout hope, if you want to call it that.
HE reply to friendo who asked for my reaction five minutes after it ended, just after 9 pm: “Excellent but horrifying, but at least the boy didn’t self-destruct at the end. He grows up by deciding to survive. Ghastly story. Excruciating.”
Tapping this out at 12:30 am and looking at 6 am wake-up, I’m not going to spill any more beans.
Orphan to Come and See: “Hold my beer.”
Wiki excerpts:
