Dementia is an issue that touches the lives of so many people and has been tackled powerfully on-screen before.
However, Florian Zeller’s The Father is a triumph in its exploration of the disorientating alien quality to a sufferer’s daily life and the resultant distress this brings to them and those around them.
Based on the director’s play Le Pere, the film follows an elderly Welshman named Anthony ( Anthony Hopkins ) whose daily life is becoming progressively influenced by his symptoms of dementia.
We see him receive a visit from his daughter Anne ( Olivia Colman ) who checks in on him at his flat before revealing that she intends to move to Paris with her new partner, which confuses Anthony as he was unaware she had one.
As events unfold, different figures visit Anthony and soon contradictory information, faces, interior environments, and identities begin to emerge, leaving Anthony even more distressed.
Hopkins offers another career-high performance here as Anthony, capturing so many different shades of his increasingly volatile character as he brings to life the confusion, panic, humour, and trauma.
An ensemble of supporting cast members are all excellent, including Colman’s crestfallen and frustrated daughter figure, but also Olivia Williams as multiple figures in Anthony’s life, Imogen Poots as a young prospective carer, and Mark Gatiss and Rufus Sewell as antagonistic male presences invading our protagonist’s space.
While all offer wonderful work, the film orbits entirely around Hopkins’ exquisite turn, which was more than deserving of the Academy Award he received earlier this year.
Elsewhere, despite this being his film directorial debut, Zeller adapts his play for the big screen with gusto, offering a profound psychological drama that mirrors its lead character’s state of confusion, fear and inconsistency.
The production design from Peter Francis and Cathy Featherstone is also entirely immersive in its mirroring of Anthony’s cognitive experience, as the interior of the character’s apartment shifts and changes in sometimes ever so slight ways and in others enormously.
This is also aided by the skilled editing of Yorgos Lamprinos, who makes these shifts in actors portraying certain characters, changing visual landscapes and plot progression both as abrupt and yet seamless as Anthony’s own understanding of events.
The uneasiness of the drama is well balanced in the script by moments of humour and love, which is also aided by the always exemplar work of composer Ludovico Einaudi.
While the film does tackle some of the hardship placed on family members when someone falls ill with dementia as in Michael Haneke’s Amour, The Father is more concerned with the experience of the individual’s point of view as they suffer - with only slight shifts to the character of Anne’s perspective.
As with real-life experiences, there can be no happy ending for families watching their loved ones suffer from this tragic illness, but The Father still manages to find beauty in the quietness of life’s ambiguities, particularly in its final moments.
Verdict
The Father is a moving and disorientating psychological drama that boasts another career-defining performance from the masterful Anthony Hopkins.
The Father is in cinemas from today.
