The Father
Directed by Florian Zeller
Running time: 1hr36 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Anthony Hopkins stars in The Father
The first time I saw The Father — alone, at home, under lockdown — the timing was either disastrous or fated. My uncle had recently passed away after a struggle with Alzheimer's, and watching a brilliant Anthony Hopkins play out the inconstant moods and terrors of the disease with expert, eerie plausibility was a little more than I could take with composure: as the credits rolled, I sobbed into my duvet for ten minutes straight. I wasn't sure about a second viewing, but with a few months' distance, the film left me drier-eyed if no less moved. There's been a run of recent films about living with dementia, and Florian Zeller's elegant debut is perhaps the most emotionally confrontational of them — in large part because it envisions the condition from the inside out.
Which is to say that the film presents the world — in permanently shifting, unfixed form — through the eyes of Anthony (Hopkins), the octogenarian Londoner who can't see that his perceptions of past and present, actuality and imagination, are irretrievably sliding into each other, and insists on going on as before. We're sympathetic to the plight of his grounded, fretful daughter Anne (Olivia Colman), as she attempts to care for someone who won't be managed, but it's not her reality we share. There's a cleverly misleading scene at the outset, as we follow her from the supermarket to Anthony's flat, but once indoors, we assume his disoriented perspective. Rooms change overnight. So do people. Others bring up past events he can't recall, while not recognising his own memories. Is it even his flat? Is Anne his daughter? And why do people keep stealing his precious watch?
Without resorting to exploitative, amped-up mystery or obfuscation, Zeller and co-writer Christopher Hampton — adapting the former's play to resourceful, Oscar-winning effect, with a subtly cinematic eye — have fashioned a sort of gaslight thriller in which the mind is both predator and prey, as it keeps short-cutting and short-circuiting, going directly to jail without passing go. There's no unreliable narrator here, since no one is being misled: Anthony's reality, with all its unchosen confusions, is fully and authentically his. Hopkins, earning every gold-plated inch of his second Oscar, inhabits it with gut-punching empathy and conviction, making us alive to every moment until, in another devastating reversal of perspective, we stand outside him once more. It's not fair to recommend The Father without a certain kind of trigger warning: if dementia has been a part of your life, Zeller's film will cut as close as you think it will. But not cruelly so, for once the sobs subside, there is a strange kind of comfort to be found in its understanding.
THE FATHER (2020) Written by Florian Zeller and Christopher Hampton | Shot by Ben Smithard | Edited by Yorgos Lamprinos
In cinemas now.