The Father

Playwright Florian Zeller makes an astonishingly assured directorial début by bringing his French stage play The Father to the big screen with a complex, heartbreaking central performance by Anthony Hopkins. Working with the great English writer Christopher Hampton (Dangerous Liaisons, Atonement, A Dangerous Method) Zeller transforms one of the most acclaimed stage plays of the 2010s into a hypnotic cinematic experience.

Hopkins stars as Anthony, a mischievous octogenarian widower in the throes of dementia. His daughter (Olivia Colman) wants to be respectful of his desire to remain living independently in his London flat, but her attempts to introduce caretakers into his life are met with evasiveness and hostility, for while Anthony’s grip on reality is becoming more and more unsure, he remains as cleverly combative as ever.

The Father recalls Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012) in its bleak depiction of how the simple act of ageing can destroy the quality of a life. It also recalls the film adaptation of Lisa Genova’s Still Alice (2014)—which won Julianne Moore her Best Actress Oscar. But what sets Zeller’s film apart from most movies that explore the crippling effects of growing old is that we don’t just watch a character deteriorate—either from a caretaker’s perspective or from their own observational point of view—we are dropped directly into the mind of someone already afflicted and we must try to grasp the situation and the narrative progression via the unreliable information he navigates from scene to scene.

It’s thrilling to see a first-time filmmaker reenvision material he created for the stage into such a fascinating, deeply empathetic use of the cinematic medium. Zeller his cinematographer Ben Smithard, production designer Peter Francis, and film editor Yorgos Lamprinos employ all sorts of cinematic slight of hand to surreptitiously maintain our connection with Anthony—keeping our understanding of time, space, and narrative chronology off balance. Yet the more Anthony’s mind breaks down over the course of the picture, the more we as viewers come to understand all that has transpired.

All the artistry that went into this adaptation would mean nothing without note-perfect turns from the small ensemble Zeller has assembled. Each member of the wonderful six-person supporting cast brings the tight, precise screenplay to vivid life with Hopkins, who appears in every second of the picture, delivering another career-defining performance. He uses his voice and physicality in ways we seen before over the course of his storied career—in roles that range from his Oscar-winning turn as the terrifying Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), to the sympathetic doctor in The Elephant Man (1980), to the painfully repressed butler in The Remains of the Day (1993)—but there is something entirely new in the way he embodies Anthony. The frailty of his 80-year-old frame contrasts with the sharpness in his eyes until those eyes begin to loose their focus and reveal the terrified soul behind them.

The Father is not an easy film to watch, as the fate of its protagonist and those around him will likely befall many of us eventually. The uneasy knowledge that we may be facing Anthony’s situation sooner than we’d like makes this picture all the more compelling and unsettling.