Fateless

Fateless (Sorstalanság, 2005) is a Hungarian wartime drama by Lajos Koltai, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Budapest, early 1940s. Fifteen-year-old György Köves is pulled off a bus on his way to work and shipped first to a labor camp, then on to Buchenwald.

What the boy (Marcell Nagy) records is not one vast horror but a string of small routines: the line for soup, the sores on his legs, quiet lessons in how to hold on to a scrap of dignity. He adapts. And the adapting is the most chilling part of all. The film rarely raises its voice — the image itself drains slowly from color into sepia and grey, as if the world is losing its pigment. Daniel Craig turns up in a small role.

The screenplay comes from Imre Kertész himself, the Nobel laureate in Literature who survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald as a teenager; the score is by Ennio Morricone. This is not a story of rescue or heroics but of a person learning to live beside catastrophe — and of what he finds waiting when he goes home. Slow, unsparing, honest. Stream Fateless (2005) online on iFILM.