LÁSZLÓ NEMES, the Oscar-winning director of Son of Saul (Arts, 29 April 2016), continues, in Orphan (Cert. 15), to examine fatherhood. Andor (Bojtorján Barabas), a Jewish boy, struggles to find this absent parent. The mother, Klara Hirsch (Andrea Waskovics), had, during the Nazi occupation of Hungary, secreted her baby in a children’s home before hiding herself. When they are reunited post-war, Orphan swiftly moves to 1957 after the failed Hungarian uprising against the Soviet Union.

With still no sign of Mr Hirsch, Andor starts his own enquiries. During one abortive attempt to locate his father, he is detained by the police. Klara secures his release, explaining that her husband was sent to a camp during the war. Unaware of this and desperate, Andor frequently takes himself off to a private place and addresses the words “Dear Sir, dearest father” into the void. He quickly runs out of anything else to say. It is left to us to decide whether he is communicating with his biological parent or praying. Either way, it is a despairing request for a moment of revelation.

Andor looks to his Jewish heritage for assistance. He joins his friend Sàri (Elíz Szabó) at her family’s Seder. There is a certain irony in the grandfather’s pronouncing “The adults and the children fled to Egypt. But only the children entered the promised land.” The Holocaust and the Soviet invasion cast doubt on such a destination for Andor’s generation. That said, Orphan has an unmistakable, if not exactly subtle, affinity with Andrei Tarkovsky films, in which a divine perspective informs hope. Nemes suggests that even in humanity’s darkest hours an inner voice might allow us to remain human.

As director, he takes a via negativa approach, defining fatherhood in terms of what it is not. Biology alone cannot nail it, and nor can nurture, as we see in the form of Mihály Berend (played with great relish by the French actor Grégory Gadebois). A butcher by trade, he took money to hide Klara from the Nazis and has a dubious, violent character.

Nevertheless, there seem to be genuine attempts to be a good father to Andor, if only the compromised Klara can persuade him. Better some father than none? Throughout the film, the boy regularly storms off at any such suggestions. As yet, Andor doesn’t accept that the search for his true father (even though so far unachieved) can in itself be something positive. Understandably, a world based on oppression, past and present, cages him in.

Mátyás Erdély’s cinematography mimics Andor’s situation. We get extreme close-ups of the boy against blurred and drab backgrounds, often seeing him through bars or other impediments that restrict full vision of who he is. Even a beautifully illuminated Ferris wheel becomes a visual metaphor of power, its Soviet red star symbolising imposition on people who wish to live by another kind of faith. And, while the wheel repeats its hamster-like turnings, we know that it will come to an end. We cannot kill the past, but freedom occurs in this film when looking for someone, human or divine, to watch over us begins to transcend oppression.