Despite a compelling scenario, the characters in László Nemes’s third feature feel more like stand-ins for ideas than flesh-and-blood people. In the closing credits of Orphan, cinematographer Mátyás Erdély receives billing before the screenwriters. While unconventional, this order aligns with the way director László Nemes creates meaning in his work. The rich sepia shadings of the photography outshine the black-and-white archetypes of the script in this chronicle of Jewish grief and denial in post-World War II Hungary. Nemes, working with co-writer Clara Royer, pulls from his own family history for Orphan’s twisted tale about reversals of fortune. The titular character, Bojtorján Barabás’ Andor, mythologizes Hirsch, the man he believes to be his late father to the point of holding conversations with him in prayer-like solemnity. The young boy convenes with his spirit through a furnace, seemingly a reclamation of the instrument that brought about his dad’s end in the Holocaust. His mother, Andrea Waskovics’ Klára, attempts to put the kibosh on the heroic narrative her son imposes on his origins. She knows the truth that escapes a twelve-year-old: the past is never as neat as the stories people tell themselves about it. Rather than envelop the audience in Andor’s growing fabulation, Nemes and Erdély shoot their introduction to the milieu of Orphan from a chilly remove. The camera’s perspective here feels either furtively captured or hovering outside their travails to survey them from above. Some of this posture for Budapest’s Jewish community is rooted in the paranoia of the 1957 setting, a year after a failed anti-Soviet uprising had them once again living in fear and looking for the exits. More often, though, it’s representative of Nemes’ limitations as a director. A character’s primary value is their aesthetic contribution to building out a frame. This approach worked for Nemes on a project like Son of Saul, where Erdély’s camera so fully plunged viewers into a subjective experience that people could pass muster as abstractions. But when it comes time for Orphan to pivot towards the personal stakes of the story, the film never narrows that emotional gap. The characters feel more like stand-ins for ideas than flesh-and-blood people. Even as its visual language more intimately situates itself in relation to the figures on screen, Andor’s struggles with the complexity of human behaviour feel no more immediate.Given how much more intriguing the second half of Orphan becomes, it’s a shame that Nemes unwittingly imposes such a low ceiling on his film. Following the re-emergence of a man from Klára’s past, Andor’s grand illusions about his heritage run headfirst into the reality of his parentage. This would-be paternal presence scrambles the clean binaries of good and evil through which the child views the world. This added complication to an already strained family dynamic pushes Andor toward vengeance and violence. He embodies a paradox that echoes through the ages: people can be both victims and perpetrators.Yet Nemes undermines the potency of his own statement with his simplistic scripting. For a film that purports to evince the contradictory nature of people, his characters are too thinly drawn to attest to this truth. There’s little to reconcile in Andor or Klára, who only seem to respond with a single stereotypical emotional reaction to each new development. And when there’s any wrinkle causing them to doubt their previously held positions, someone on-screen will declare the impossible intellectual dilemmas out loud.Orphan renders its compelling concept in narratively shallow and dramaturgically flat terms. The film’s stellar leading performance from Bojtorján Barabás seems to occur despite the character’s lack of depth and direction. Erdély’s camera captures the tension between the steely resolve of Andor’s facial expressions and the conflict brewing inside his heart and mind. It’s difficult in some films with young protagonists to discern where the childlike innocence of an actor ends and a filmmaker’s one-dimensional outlook begins. Here, that proves less of a challenge. The post Orphan – first-look review first appeared on Little White Lies.