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A watch. A painting. A chicken dinner. A snippet of conversation.

These and other everyday pieces of a life take on greater significance and heartbreaking meaning throughout the course of “The Father.” They’re at once mundane and unreliable, tactile and elusive within the ever-shifting mind of Anthony Hopkins ’ character, an 80-year-old Londoner succumbing to dementia.

Writer/director Florian Zeller , adapting his prize-winning, 2012 French play of the same name with the help of the legendary Christopher Hampton (“ Dangerous Liaisons ,” “ Atonement ”), has pulled off a dazzling feat here. He puts us within the mind of the ailing Hopkins’ Anthony, allowing us to experience his confusion as if it were our own. But he also offers the perspective of the caretakers and loved ones who try to settle his volatile temper and organize his jumbled memories. We never know what’s true—or who, for that matter, as characters come and go and take on various names and identities, depending on his recognition of them. Everything is fleeting and yet each specific moment feels urgent and real.

Struggling to navigate this muddied mélange of past and present is a brilliant Hopkins, giving a performance that’s both charismatic and ferocious, sometimes within the same breath. There’s mind-blowing specificity to his technique here as he’s called upon to convey a wide range of feelings and emotions, but also a softness and openness we’ve rarely seen from him. It’s some of the absolute best work of Hopkins’ lengthy and storied career.

And as his daughter, Anne, Olivia Colman is consistently his equal. She, too, must ride this roller coaster and struggle to put on a British, stiff upper lip within a situation that’s steadily crumbling. She’ll manage a smile as tears well in her eyes or flinch ever so slightly yet maintain her patience when her father says something rude and insulting. As our guide—as much as Zeller will allow us one—Colman is tremendous as always.

But mainly we see the world through Anthony’s eyes, and at first, that seems like a pretty peaceful place to be. When we spy him initially, he’s listening to opera on a pleasant afternoon in his spacious, tastefully appointed London flat. But soon, Anne stops by to visit and informs him she’s met someone and is moving to Paris to be with him. His demeanor changes instantly and, feeling wounded, he lashes out: “You?” he asks incredulously. “You mean, a man?” Later, as the long-term reality of this news hits him, he reveals a deeper layer of hurt: “So if I understand correctly, you’re leaving me, is that it? You’re abandoning me.” His face falls a bit but he still tries to exert a measure of control and bravado.

Some version of this sort of conversation happens again and again—over where he placed his beloved watch, for example, or the cruel treatment he inflicted upon his previous at-home caregiver. And just when we think we’re getting into the rhythm of “The Father,” it changes the tempo and the players. Maybe this isn’t Anthony’s flat—maybe it’s Anne’s and she’s taken him in to stay with her. Maybe she has a husband after all, named Paul ( Rufus Sewell ), with whom she still lives. And maybe now she’s being played by Olivia Williams in a clever bit of casting, given their similar features. The arrival of Imogen Poots as a potential candidate to look after Anthony provides some sunshine, as it gives him the opportunity to flirt with a pretty young woman. He’s randy and charming as he declares playfully, “Time for an aperitif!” But she also reminds him of his other daughter, who was an artist, and whatever happened to that painting of hers that was hanging above the mantle … ? Anthony’s first meeting with Poots’ Laura is a great example of what a shock it can be when Zeller pulls the rug out from underneath us—never in gimmicky fashion, but rather as a reflection of the jarring changes occurring within the character’s mind and mood. We feel them, too.

But while some moments of memory loss cause a jolt in the story and give Hopkins room to express his character’s frustration grandly, what’s happening throughout with the production design and editing is so subtle, it’ll make you want to rewind a few seconds just to appreciate the slight changes. Whether it’s different tiles on the kitchen backsplash, a rearranged bedroom or a white grocery bag instead of a blue one holding the chicken to roast that night, production designer Peter Francis vividly creates various versions of this same, enclosed setting. And what editor Yorgos Lamprinos does here is so complicated and yet so understated, it’s like a magic trick right before our eyes. Lamprinos, our Los Angeles Film Critics Association winner for best editing, had the daunting task of crafting a story that’s simultaneously confusing and compelling, and he rose elegantly to that challenge. And the score from Ludovico Einaudi , whose music also appeared recently in Chloé Zhao ’s gorgeous “ Nomadland ,” mirrors the performances in the way it tugs at our hearts without being mawkish.  

The fluid nature of the narrative calls to mind Charlie Kaufman ’s achingly melancholy drama “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” from last fall. While Kaufman’s story was deeply steeped in his trademark surrealism, what’s so sad about both films is the way they portray the notions of home and family—which should be safe harbors—as ephemeral. The people and imagery we rely on to define us may look familiar, but there’s something slightly off, and that’s deeply unsettling. I suspect it will be especially so for viewers who’ve experienced such a decline with members of their own family. But perhaps it will provide some solace, as well.

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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The Father (2021)

Rated PG-13 for some strong language, and thematic material.

Anthony Hopkins as Anthony

Olivia Colman as Anne

Mark Gatiss as The Man

Olivia Williams as The Woman

Imogen Poots as Laura

Rufus Sewell as Paul

Ayesha Dharker as Dr Sarai

• Florian Zeller

Writer (play)

• Christopher Hampton

Cinematographer

• Ben Smithard
• Yorgos Lamprinos
• Ludovico Einaudi

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The Father review – Hopkins a wordy Oscar winner

Academy winner Anthony Hopkins tackles the script’s verbosity with aplomb but this study of dementia remains somewhat stagey

T his year’s Oscars closed on an unexpectedly awkward note when the award for best actor, which had been moved to the very end of the ceremony, went not to Chadwick Boseman (who the bookies had tipped as a posthumous favourite) but to an absent Anthony Hopkins. Yet despite predictions to the contrary, no one should have been surprised by Hopkins’s win , since his performance in this highly praised stage-to-screen melodrama is pure Oscar-bait: showy, wordy and worthy.

Hopkins plays Anthony, father of doting daughter Anne (Olivia Colman), who is struggling to manage her dad’s dementia. When we first meet Anthony, he has just seen off a carer, calling her a “little bitch” and suspecting her of stealing his watch, the subject of a fretful, forgetful obsession. Anthony also accuses Anne of wanting to get him out of his flat, so that she can take it for herself. But as he moves from room to room, it gradually becomes clear that past, present and future are colliding, that events from different periods of Anthony’s life, in different settings, are coexisting within his immediate experience of the “present”.

Identities are similarly fluid, with single characters played by several actors, representing Anthony’s growing confusion over who people are and how they relate to him. Thus, Mark Gatiss and Rufus Sewell perform mirrored lines as interchangeable (and sometimes hostile) male figures; Olivia Colman and Olivia Williams overlap as they buy and prepare a chicken dinner; and Imogen Poots plays a new carer who reminds Anthony of Lucy, the absent daughter whose name provokes worried stares and hurt glances from those around him.

Director Florian Zeller’s award-winning source play Le Père was previously adapted for the screen as Floride , an altogether more whimsical 2015 French film starring Jean Rochefort. But whereas film-maker Philippe Le Guay opened up the confined canvas of the play, Zeller and his Oscar-winning co-writer Christopher Hampton (who had previously written a French-to-English stage translation of Le Père ) instead highlight the claustrophobia and “mystery” of Anthony’s first-person world, trapping him within labyrinthine rooms and corridors, like the leading characters of Michael Haneke’s Amour .

Huge plaudits are due to production designer Peter Francis, whose subtly reconfigured sets disorient the viewer, matching Anthony’s increasingly bewildered experience. Yet despite the effectiveness of this cinematic device, The Father (which is Zeller’s directorial feature debut) still retains a whiff of staginess, occasionally invoking the spectre of Roman Polanski’s inert stage-to-screen stodge Carnage .

Part of the problem is the performative wordiness of Hopkins’s role, which, despite Zeller’s “no acting required” mantra, calls for long torrents of monologue-like thought, interspersed by bursts of out-of-context laughter and middle-distance gazing. He handles the gear shifts with enthusiasm and aplomb, but when Anthony finally breaks down, there’s little of the restrained cumulative power of a comparable scene from Richard Attenborough’s screen adaptation of Shadowlands . Hopkins may have won Oscars for The Father and for his pantomime-inflected performance as Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs , but it’s in the rigorous understatement of films such as The Remains of the Day that his true brilliance shines through.

It has become something of a screen cliche that characters with dementia are interesting only if their minds were once “exceptional”. Just as Julianne Moore bagged an Oscar playing a celebrated academic with early-onset Alzheimer’s in Still Alice , much is made here of Anthony’s love of opera and the range of his knowledge, as if the height from which he falls somehow makes his illness more tragic (it doesn’t). Yet neither of these awards-feted productions comes close to matching Natalie Erika James’s underrated Australian masterpiece Relic , a heartbreaking horror film that features the best (and most affecting) screen depiction of Alzheimer’s I have ever seen.

Elsewhere, dripping taps and refractive prisms (into which Colman stares pointedly) offer somewhat clunky visual metaphors, capped off by the fragmented face of a vast Igor Mitoraj sculpture, driving the point home. For all its apparent structural complexities, The Father is not quite as mysterious as its creators would have us believe.

This article was amended on 13 June 2021 because an earlier version, referring to Zeller’s source play Le Père, misrendered it as “La Père” due to a production error.

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Movie Reviews

Movie review: 'the father'.

Bob Mondello

An elderly pensioner, played by Anthony Hopkins, refuses all assistance, to the distress of his daughter, played by Olivia Colman, in the dementia drama The Father.

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

When you've played King Lear, Hannibal Lecter, Richard Nixon, a pope, and a superhero's dad, there are not a lot of acting hills left to climb. But critic Bob Mondello says Anthony Hopkins has found one that might be his steepest yet - the title role in the film, "The Father."

BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: Anthony is a proud English pensioner living on his own in a handsome London flat - well, almost on his own. Anne, his devoted daughter, visits him every day.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE FATHER")

ANTHONY HOPKINS: (As Anthony) What are you doing here?

OLIVIA COLMAN: (As Anne) What do you think?

HOPKINS: (As Anthony) Huh?

MONDELLO: Anne would love to keep Anthony independent - if he'll let her.

COLMAN: (As Anne) So what happened?

HOPKINS: (As Anthony) Nothing.

COLMAN: (As Anne) Nothing happened?

HOPKINS: (As Anthony) No.

COLMAN: (As Anne) I've just had her on the phone.

HOPKINS: (As Anthony) So? What does that prove?

COLMAN: (As Anne) You can't go on behaving like this.

HOPKINS: (As Anthony) Well, it's my flat, isn't it? This is incredible. You burst in on me as if - I have no idea who she is, this woman. I never asked her for anything.

COLMAN: (As Anne) She's here to help you.

HOPKINS: (As Anthony) To help me do what? I don't need her. I don't need anyone.

MONDELLO: He's driven away three caretakers and is clearly slipping mentally, which wreaks havoc in Anne's life. She'd planned to move to Paris, so what's the problem this time?

HOPKINS: (As Anthony) She was stealing from me.

COLMAN: (As Anne) Angela? Of course not. What are you talking about?

HOPKINS: (As Anthony) I'm telling you. She stole my watch. Yes.

COLMAN: (As Anne) Your watch?

HOPKINS: (As Anthony) Yes.

COLMAN: (As Anne) Isn't it more likely you just lost it?

MONDELLO: Anne suggests a spot he might look, and he comes back a moment later wearing the watch. Crisis averted. After Anne's left, though, Anthony finds a man in his sitting room. New crisis.

MARK GATISS: (As The Man) Anthony, it's me, Paul.

HOPKINS: (As Anthony) Who? What are you doing here?

GATISS: (As The Man) I live here.

HOPKINS: (As Anthony) You live here in my flat? Oh, that's the best yet. What is this nonsense?

MONDELLO: French writer-director Florian Zeller is adapting his own play here and using tricks he couldn't onstage. In mid-scene, on-screen, he can make subtle changes to Anthony's flat - wall colors, light fixtures - so that the character's confusion about where he is becomes our confusion. And Zeller's playing tricks with casting, too. Anthony's daughter, Anne, is played by Olivia Colman...

COLMAN: (As Anne) I can't leave you here on your own. It's not possible.

MONDELLO: ...Except when she's played by another Olivia, Olivia Williams.

HOPKINS: (As Anthony) Where's Anne?

OLIVIA WILLIAMS: (As The Woman) I'm here. I just went down to do some shopping, and I'm back now.

MONDELLO: Not to mention Zeller's biggest trick. In his play, "The Father," the title character was named Andre. In his film, Zeller's cast Anthony Hopkins and renamed the character Anthony, encouraging us to hear echoes of the Anthony Hopkins we know - the Shakespearean...

HOPKINS: (As Anthony) I'm not leaving my flat. I am not leaving my flat.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) This isn't your flat, Anthony.

HOPKINS: (As Anthony) Sorry?

MONDELLO: ...Also Hopkins, the charming old coot...

HOPKINS: (As Anthony) Tap dancing is my specialty. I'm still great at it. I'll show you.

(SOUNDBITE OF TAP DANCING)

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character, laughing).

HOPKINS: (As Anthony) Aye (laughter). Jolly good. Why are you laughing?

MONDELLO: ...And Hopkins, the guy you should never let your guard down around.

HOPKINS: (As Anthony) I know who she reminds me of.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Who?

HOPKINS: (As Anthony) It's Lucy, Lucy when she was younger.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Lucy?

HOPKINS: (As Anthony) Her unbearable habit of laughing inanely. I had you there, didn't I? (Laughter).

MONDELLO: Hopkins gives us what amounts to an acting tour de show of force, except when...

HOPKINS: (As Anthony) You're abandoning me.

COLMAN: (As Anne) Dad.

MONDELLO: ...He lets the fire go out of his eyes.

HOPKINS: (As Anthony) What's going to become of me?

MONDELLO: A less subtle filmmaker might try to take us inside mental deterioration with jarring edits or other film tricks. In "The Father," Zeller simply presents us with the title character's reality and lets us fend for ourselves. I'm Bob Mondello.

(SOUNDBITE OF LUDOVICO EINAUDI, FEDERICO MECOZZI AND REDI HASA'S "LOW MIST VAR. 2 - DAY 1")

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‘The Father’ Review: Anthony Hopkins Gives a Tour-de-Force Performance

Anthony Hopkins delivers a tour-de-force performance in Florian Zeller's drama of dementia, which puts us in the mind of a man who's losing his.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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There have been some good dramas about people sliding into dementia, like “Away From Her” and “Still Alice,” but I confess I almost always have a problem with them. As the person at the center of the movie begins to recede from her adult children, from the larger world, and from herself, he or she also recedes — at least, this is my experience — from the audience. I have never been sure how to get around that, but in “ The Father ,” the French playwright and novelist Florian Zeller, making his auspicious debut as a feature-film director (the movie is based on his 2014 play), has found a way.

At the beginning, Anne ( Olivia Colman ), in London, returns to her large, stately, and tastefully cozy book-lined flat, with its sky-blue walls, and greets her father, Anthony ( Anthony Hopkins ), who is 80 years old and needs looking after. His memory has been slipping, though he hasn’t lost his feisty combative spirit — qualities we’ve come to expect from Anthony Hopkins, though in this film they’re merely the first couple of onion layers of a brilliant, mercurial, and moving performance. Anthony, in what we’re led to believe is typical behavior for him, has subjected his most recent caregiver to so much cantankerous abuse that she quit. Anne could hire another one, but it’s not that simple. As she finally tells him, she’s moving to Paris to be with the man she loves. What’s right on her lips — but she can’t bring herself to say it — is that it’s probably time for Anthony to go into a nursing home.

Strolling into the living room, he encounters a man sitting there calmly, reading The Guardian. It’s his daughter’s husband (Mark Gatiss); they all live together in the house. Moments later, the daughter returns, but it’s a different woman from before (now played by Olivia Williams), who announces that she’s bought a chicken to cook for dinner. Anthony, stunned by this shift in reality, tries to adjust and makes a reference to the husband — and she looks at him with a blank stare. There is no husband. (She was divorced five years ago.) There’s no chicken, either.

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Which scenario is real, and which one has Anthony hallucinated? We can’t quite tell, but in each case what we’re seeing feels real, and that’s the film’s ingenious gambit. In “The Father,” Zeller plants us inside a convincing homespun reality only to reveal that it was a mirage; before our eyes, the solidity turns to quicksand. Or was the reality before it the mirage? The film gives us small sharp clues to get our bearings, and each time we do it pulls the rug out again, seducing us into thinking that this time we’re on firm ground.

“The Father” does something that few movies about mental deterioration in old age have brought off in quite this way, or this fully. It places us in the mind of someone losing his mind — and it does so by revealing that mind to be a place of seemingly rational and coherent experience. At times, the film seems to be putting King Lear in the Twilight Zone; at others, it’s like “The Shining” with Harold Pinter soap opera in place of demons. “The Father” is a chamber piece, but it has the artistic verve to keep twisting the reality it shows us without becoming a stunt. And that’s because there’s a raging-against-the-dying-of-the-light saddened desperation to it. Anthony isn’t just “fantasizing.” He’s seeing true-blue pieces of his life dance with primal enactments of his fears. His mind is like a vivid but faulty TV remote — it’s clinging to life even as it clicks to the next everyday dream.

Anne returns, introducing a new caregiver, Laura (Imogen Poots), who is so youthful and vibrant that she lifts Anthony’s spirit, to the point that he flirts and pours some whiskeys. She reminds him of Anne’s sister, Lucy, who’s an artist (several of her paintings hang on the walls). But there’s a hush in the air every time Lucy’s name is mentioned. Also on hand is Anne’s husband — I mean her real husband, Paul, played by Rufus Sewell with such cuttingly plausible resentment that we know in our guts he’s truly there. He’s the one pushing, harder than anyone, for Anthony to go into a home.

Watching “The Father,” we’re drawn right into the I-see-ghosts-can’t-you-see-them-too? experience of dementia. But we also put together the puzzle of Anthony’s life, and what gets to us is that we’re gathering the pieces even as he’s losing them, one by one. He keeps scrambling up the identities of the people close to him, which allows Zeller to play neat tricks with his actors. And Anthony both knows it and doesn’t know it. Because like any of us he believes what he sees. All the actors in “The Father” are vivid (Colman brings her role a loving vulnerability that warms you), but Hopkins is flat-out stunning. He acts, for a while, with grizzled charm and roaring certainty, but the quality that holds his performance together, and begins to take it over, is a cosmic confusion laced with terror. Anthony is losing more than his memory — he’s losing himself. The triumph of Hopkins’ acting is that even as he does, you’re right there with him.

Reviewed at Sundance Film Festival, Jan. 27, 2020. Running time: 97 MIN.

• Production: (U.K.-France) A Sony Pictures Classics release of a Trademark Films, Cine@, Embankment Films, Film4, Viewfinder production. Producers: Simon Friend, Christophe Spadone, Philippe Carcassonne, Jean-Louis Livi, David Parfitt. Executive producers: Lauren Dark, Ollie Madden, Daniel Battsek, Hugo Grumbar, Tim Haslam, Paul Grindey, Zygi Kamasa.
• Crew: Director: Florian Zeller. Screenplay: Christopher Hampton, Florian Zeller. Camera: Ben Smithard. Editor: Yorgos Lamprinos. Music: Ludovico Einaudi.
• With: Anthony Hopkins, Olivia Colman, Mark Gatiss, Imogen Poots , Rufus Sewell, Olivia Williams.

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Review: ‘The Father’ showcases Anthony Hopkins at his devastating best

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In “The Father’s” house are many rooms, all of them beautifully appointed with details so sharp and precise that you might be startled to find them vanishing a few moments later: Didn’t those backsplash tiles look different a minute ago? Wasn’t there a lamp on that side table? The French writer-director Florian Zeller, adapting his internationally acclaimed play for the screen, has a meticulous eye and a keen sense of mischief, which doesn’t lighten so much as heighten the implacable tragedy at the heart of this story. The moment-to-moment pleasures of trying to decipher the plot give way to crushing futility; you’re left sifting through the pieces of a puzzle that’s almost too painful to solve.

Those pieces have been plucked from the life of an 80-year-old Englishman named Anthony. Known as André in the play, he has been renamed here in honor of his interpreter, Anthony Hopkins, who repays it with a performance of extraordinary psychological cunning and emotional force. We first encounter Anthony in a darkened London apartment, listening to a recording of Henry Purcell and John Dryden’s 1691 dramatic opera “King Arthur, or the British Worthy.” Before long his daughter, Anne (Olivia Colman), comes in and the music stops, though not before the opening lines of an aria have rung out: “What power art thou, who from below / Hast made me rise unwillingly and slow / From beds of everlasting snow?”

The opera reference is a studied choice but an apt one: Soon enough, a deep, menacing chill descends on this movie like a fog and stays there, wrapping around the mind of a man trying to shake off his slumber. Less an unreliable narrator than an unreliable observer, Anthony is in a rapidly advancing state of dementia, a condition that manifests itself in fugue states, memory lapses and volatile fits of temper. His fierce tantrums have recently burned through a series of in-home nurses, leaving Anne at her wits’ end. This much of the situation is clear enough, mainly because it keeps getting reiterated for Anthony’s benefit — patiently by Anne, who tries to coax him into behaving , and more resentfully by her husband, Paul (Rufus Sewell), who occasionally turns up to protest the disruption of their once stable, comfortable lives.

Anthony, for his part, has a rather different understanding of who’s intruding on whom. His daughter sometimes becomes a stranger. He is visited and attended to by others he doesn’t recognize, played with gently obliging smiles by actors including Imogen Poots, Mark Gatiss and Olivia Williams. (In addition to the doubled Anthonys, the casting of two equally superb Olivias slyly compounds the confusion.) He mutters and rants about unwanted caretakers and stolen possessions, namely the watch that keeps vanishing from his wrist — an effective if on-the-nose nod to his slippery sense of time. He reacts to each new piece of information with skepticism and fascination as if he were an investigator making a surprising discovery rather than a man losing his grip on reality.

“The Father,” in other words, is both a detective story and a study in confinement, a mystery set within the labyrinthine recesses of a deteriorating mind. The original play (whose English translator, Christopher Hampton, is credited alongside Zeller for the screenplay) availed itself of the natural abstractions of theatrical space, turning the stage into a psychological hall of mirrors. But Zeller, making an elegant and incisive feature debut, finds an ideal equivalent within the more realistic parameters of the movie screen. The airlessness that stifles so many stage-to-screen adaptations only serves to reinforce this film’s mood of entrapment, barely diminished by the opera selections and the recurring strains of Ludovico Einaudi‘s original score. The imposing physicality of the apartment makes it that much more startling when the movie begins to undermine its own premises.

I mean premises quite literally. The flat features a long hallway that seems to stretch toward infinity, with doors that lead into interconnected, sometimes interchangeable-looking rooms. Ben Smithard’s deep-focus widescreen compositions with restrained lighting and slightly muted colors confound your sense of direction, even as they invite you to rummage through the details of Peter Francis’ intricate production design. And as those details — the tiles and that painting, the pottery and the furniture — begin to shift imperceptibly from scene to scene, our understanding of time, space and reality begins to rupture in concert with Anthony’s. (Among recent movies, “The Father” would make quite a haunted-house triple bill with “Relic” and “I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” which also dramatize cognitive decay via compulsively mutating decor.)

How closely do Zeller’s formal conceits approximate the real, lived experience of dementia? The answer to that question is fundamentally unknowable and possibly irrelevant; as we’ve seen from “Away From Her,” “Still Alice” and other fine dramas about the impact of Alzheimer’s disease on a family, this kind of radically subjective storytelling isn’t a prerequisite for empathy or emotional truth. Even still, the rigorous interiority of “The Father” compels your attention: If narrative cinema is largely predicated on the illusion of seamlessness, there’s something apt about the way Zeller both upholds and shatters that illusion, bridging the narrative gap across a series of jarring discontinuities. You can imagine the mind doing something similar, struggling for lucidity in the wake of mounting incoherence.

But you don’t need to imagine it, because for the entirety of the movie’s fleet 97-minute running time, Hopkins embodies it. His Anthony can be vulnerable and fierce, broken and defiant: His moments of verbal acuity and self-aware humor exist on a continuum with his equally sudden lapses into oblivion. In one scene, he disarms a visitor with flirtatious charm and even does an impromptu dance only to turn the tables with stinging viciousness: It’s not clear if this is the real Anthony, in full, ferocious possession of his faculties, or an unrecognizably distorted version of him or some strange conflation of both. We see both the singular, towering personality he once was and the fumbling fragility to which he will soon be reduced.

If it feels redundant to invoke Shakespeare with regard to this particular actor, it also seems like more than happenstance that Hopkins, having recently played King Lear in a 2018 TV adaptation, has now stepped into a role with obvious Learian overtones. This is, as its title suggests, the story of not just a disintegrating psyche, but also a disintegrating relationship between a father and a daughter whose love he can no longer see or feel. “The Father” may be a remarkable feat of sustained identification, but beyond the margins of Anthony’s experience — and primarily in the figure of Anne, whom Colman brings to aching, tremulous life — we catch glimpses of other characters and other stories: a terrible accident, a broken marriage, a second chance at love.

These stories may be half-buried memories or hallucinatory projections, but they are real enough to mark “The Father” as more than just one man’s tragedy. The film’s final embrace is a quietly astounding vision of grace in solitude, and it harks back to that opening aria, with its invocation of eternal winter and the unheard rejoinder that follows: “ ’Tis Love, ’tis Love, ’tis Love that has warm’d us.”

‘The Father’ Rating: PG-13, for some strong language, and thematic material Running time: 1 hour, 37 minutes Playing: Starts Feb. 26 at Vineland Drive-In, City of Industry; available March 26 on PVOD platforms

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‘The Father’ is a meticulously constructed story in which very little is what it seems

In the intricate, exquisitely crafted movie “The Father,” Anthony Hopkins plays Anthony, an elderly gentleman living in a well-appointed flat in London, where he’s been living with his daughter Anne (Olivia Colman) until she informs him that she’s moving to Paris to be with a man she’s recently met.

Such is the inciting incident in what promises to be a wrenching but touching story of filial loyalty, agonizing separation and self-discovery. But very little is what it seems in this meticulously constructed jewel box of a film, which reveals ever more complicating and contradictory facets as the reality of Anthony’s experience becomes progressively clearer.

Or murkier. Directed by Florian Zeller, here adapting his own play with the help of screenwriter Christopher Hampton, “The Father” is ostensibly about a man grappling with the onset of dementia, when simple recall and daily logic can become quandaries of existential depth. Is the woman he calls Anne really Anne? Or is it another character entirely, played by Olivia Williams? Is Paul (Rufus Sewell) Anne’s husband or an interloping malefactor? Anthony turns on the headlights for Laura (Imogen Poots), a sweet-natured caretaker Anne wants to hire before she departs for France. His twinkling, avuncular flirtation will ring true to anyone who has witnessed firsthand how convincing cognitively challenged people can be, when reflexive charm and muscle memory take over from the confusion that threatens to sink the whole ship.

Hopkins slips seamlessly into his role as the vulnerable, imperious, terrified and cantankerous Anthony; he’s lovable and exasperating in perfectly equal measure as he swims against the invisible tide of aging and mental decline. “The Father” provides sensitive, superbly compassionate insight into many things, including the fragility of dignity, the ghost prints left by grief and love, and the abiding mysteries of consciousness itself. Aided by a masterful production design by Peter Francis, Zeller plunges viewers into Anthony’s mind as it shifts and seizes, trying to make sense of a present that insists on blurring into the past. Not since “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” has a filmmaker so thoroughly put the audience inside the experience of a protagonist, to such shattering emotional effect.

Anthony Hopkins is welcoming old age by embracing his inner child

As grim as the subject is, viewers might expect “The Father” to be a downer. But it’s such a powerful theatrical experience, and such a handsome chamber piece for the combined talents of its accomplished cast, that it’s improbably bracing. Its ingenious hall-of-mirrors construction transforms what could be a dull, maudlin wallow into a lively, improbably inviting battle of wits — between Anthony and the people who love and torment him, and between Zeller and the audience. “The Father,” ultimately, is a paradox: as nuanced as it is bluntly direct, as tough as it is tender. In its own elegant, confounding, chimerical and compassionate way, it’s a lot like life.

PG-13.  At area theaters; available March 26 on premium video on demand. Contains some strong language and mature thematic material. 97 minutes.

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The Father Reviews

Anthony Hopkins’ Oscar-winning act leaves you with a heavy heart.

Full Review | Jan 10, 2024

The great Anthony Hopkins plays Anthony, an eighty-something-year-old man who’s constantly at war with his own cognition.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

Through our protagonist’s mental condition, we witness how human consciousness turns against us. That an ill mind can make a cruel and grotesque joke about our very existence, setting up a punch line that will tear down the world we thought we lived in.

The Father is an overwhelmingly devastating depiction of the painfully progressive disease that is dementia. Anthony Hopkins delivers an award-worthy, powerfully compelling performance. One of the best movies I've seen in the last couple of years.

Full Review | Original Score: A+ | Jul 24, 2023

The Father has, like his [protagonist's] mind, an elliptical structure, made of holes and voids. Allowing us to get lost and confounded in its thrilleresque atmosphere... [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | May 3, 2023

An act of empathic genius.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 9, 2022

“The Father” is a tough watch. But the bold choices, the emotional honesty, the crisp detailed storytelling, and the tour de force performance from Anthony Hopkins (among other things) make every second worthwhile.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 17, 2022

The script ensnares us into the life of this man, though the audiovisual elements could've been more inspired. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Aug 11, 2022

The Father deserves recognition and appreciation.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 3, 2022

It is not just a film that you watch, it is a film that you experience - mind, body, and soul.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | May 13, 2022

Capped by one of the most harrowing speeches youll see all year, The Father belongs in that special category of films that are brilliant but may require a bit of a break before you see them again

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 2, 2022

It's an incredibly accomplished, well-structured chamber drama, aided in its translation to English by playwright and screenwriter Christopher Hampton.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 12, 2022

Not only is the film absolutely affecting, but the sheer confidence that it carries would be impressive for any film much less a directorial debut.

Full Review | Feb 12, 2022

The film does what Christopher Nolan keeps trying and failing at, which is to ever so gingerly reach into our minds and tweak out the corners and meaty pieces of our perceptions, before we even notice what's being done

Full Review | Jan 14, 2022

Extraordinary. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 7, 2021

Director Florian Zeller makes light work of this adaption of his play, using the camera to recreate the claustrophobia and uncertainty of relying on an uncertain mind.

Full Review | Nov 6, 2021

Anthony Hopkins is one of the best actors alive right now, undoubtedly. The Father was one of the best surprises of 2020, with an incredible visual concept that blows my mind when I think this is Zeller's first film. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Oct 22, 2021

[Much] of the strength of the film lies in Anthony Hopkins' lead performance alongside Olivia Colman, Zeller's direction is nothing to sniff at.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 8, 2021

It's a film that's worth more for its conception and execution than its ideological discourse or social agenda. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Sep 29, 2021

Memory is not linear, and 'The Father' captures what it must feel like when memories stop connecting. Anthony Hopkins gives one of his great performances.

Full Review | Sep 14, 2021

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Anthony Hopkins' dementia drama The Father is a quiet revelation: Review

T he Father is hardly the first prestige drama to address dementia — in fact, it's actually the third in this past month alone, after Supernova and the Viggo Mortenson-helmed Falling — but it manages to do something films like this rarely do: portray the real-time ravages of the disease from the inside out.

That writer-director Florian Zeller, working from his own acclaimed 2012 French-language play Le Pére , is able to turn devastating illness into a kind of disjointed poetry — and one still threaded with real emotional resonance — is a testament to his skill as a first-time filmmaker. But also to the beautifully shaded performances he elicits from his stars, including Anthony Hopkins as Anthony, a retired engineer falling deeper into the twilit recesses of his mind, and Olivia Colman as his long-suffered daughter and caretaker.

A proudly dapper gentleman of a certain age, Anthony mostly potters around the confines of his spacious London flat (or is it really his?), and seems to take a combative pleasure in provoking Colman's beleaguered Anne, whether he's needling her about her love life or roundly dismissing her attempts to bring in professional minders to look after him. They're all petty thieves, he insists, and entirely unnecessary anyway.

But the faces of these various home aids (played primarily by Imogen Poots and Olivia Williams) seem to shift in ways that increasingly don't make sense to him; so too do the men (Rufus Sewell and Mark Gatiss) Anne is supposedly married to. And where is his other grown daughter, the one that Poots' pretty, laughing Laura reminds him of?

The less Anthony is sure of, the more imperious he tends to be — puffed with outraged dignity one moment and coolly dismissive the next. He bluffs and bristles, wheedles and charms; at one point, he even does a jaunty little soft-shoe. Still, the threads of his life are loosening, and Hopkins' eyes, still a keen Siberian-husky blue, register more and more that things are not where and how they should be.

Though nearly of all this takes place inside apartment walls, Zeller somehow staves off claustrophobia; there's a warm, painterly quality to the light that pours in, and a graceful pacing to the script (translated and adapted by Atonement screenwriter Christopher Hampton) that allows its growing resonance to creep in, quietly.

The skillfulness of the telling, paradoxically, can make The Father feel at times almost too painful to sit through; as the story shifts elliptically in and out of time, Anthony's losses become our own. By its end though, the movie has become a profoundly moving meditation not just on perception and reality, but also on the limits of familial care — and all the ways that illness can make the people we love the most unrecognizable, even to themselves. Grade: B+

( The Father is in select theaters Friday and comes to VOD March 26.)

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The Father Is a Devastating Close-up of a Mind That’s Beginning to Fray

Anthony (Anthony Hopkins) has come unstuck in time. He can never seem to find his watch, and he suspects that someone has taken it — maybe one of the women hired to be his caregivers or the man he encounters in the living room who claims to be married to his daughter. Inevitably, it turns out to be in the bathroom, where he has always hidden his valuables, a habit that’s not nearly as secret as he seems to think it is. Anthony’s desire to enforce order on the day is countered by the way that the hours keep slipping by him; he’ll still be in his pajamas when he finds himself being asked to sit down to dinner. His daughter, Anne (Olivia Colman), will tell him things, like that she’s met someone and that she’s going to Paris to be with him. But when he brings the move up later, she has no idea what he’s talking about. More frighteningly, sometimes she looks like another person entirely (and is played by another, Olivia Williams) who still calls him “Dad” and wants to know why he’s looking at her that way. All he can do is mutter about how there’s something funny going on, a comment that does little to capture the scope of his disorientation.

The Father is the directorial debut of French novelist and playwright Florian Zeller, which he adapted from his own play with the help of Christopher Hampton. It’s an intimately scaled drama that manages to be terrifying, unfolding as it does primarily from the unmoored perspective of someone in serious cognitive decline. What’s so nightmarish about Anthony’s situation is that he retains just enough of himself to understand that something is terribly wrong. He runs up against the walls of his own constrained existence, feeling loss and panic and rarely able to pin down why. When the film opens, he’s living alone in the London apartment he bought three decades before, a spacious, handsomely appointed place with fawn-colored walls. He has already chased off the latest caregiver hired by Anne to look after him, insisting that he’s fine, and for a moment, he seems that way. Then he loses track of the conversation. By the next scene, it starts to seem as though maybe this apartment isn’t his; maybe he has moved in with Anne and doesn’t remember.

The Father is assembled like a puzzle box, its chronology curling in on itself in cunning ways. Certain details — a chicken dinner, a divorce, the arrival of a new home aide named Laura (Imogen Poots), a conversation about nursing homes, Paris — keep returning, making it unclear if we’re in the past or present. The constant is heartbreak: As the film moves along, it starts dipping more and more into Anne’s point of view, and it becomes evident that she’s being swallowed whole by her efforts to care for her aging parent. Her father knows that she has a husband, sometimes, while at other times he’s surprised to find a man he doesn’t recognize in the house — one who’s played by Rufus Sewell in certain scenes and Mark Gatiss in others. Anne’s husband is a lot less patient with Anthony than Anne is. It’s possible we already know what happens to this marriage. It’s possible we’re told the ending of the movie in the very first scene, though it doesn’t matter to Anthony, who exists in the moment in the most anxiety-inducing way possible.

Some plays feel airless and constrained when brought to the screen, but the claustrophobia of The Father — which rarely leaves the apartments and, eventually, health-care facilities in which it’s primarily set — works in its favor. These high-ceilinged spaces serve as the backdrop for two astounding and admirably unsentimental performances. Whatever the relationship between Anne and Anthony was like before his dementia, his condition has only made the cracks in their connection more apparent.

As Anne, Colman offers up shattered smiles and extends endless patience while entertaining a dark fantasy of smothering Anthony in his sleep. As Anthony, Hopkins leans into the character’s capacity for cruelty as well as his vulnerability, working himself into a crescendo of outrage or cutting Anne to the quick with accusations of theft or by insisting that her sister — whose absence he laments with the blitheness of someone who has forgotten what happened — was always his favorite. Hopkins, who shows no signs of slowing down at 83, has always been capable of exuding authority and distinction, but as Anthony, he deftly toggles between bluster and vulnerability. Anthony may not have been an especially warm figure in his prime, but Hopkins makes it painfully clear that dementia is stripping him of any dignity. Masterful and agonizing, The Father is a gorgeously crafted film about a doomed arrangement entered into with love, even though it can only end in tragedy.

*This article appears in the March 1, 2021, issue of  New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!

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• anthony hopkins
• olivia colman
• florian zeller
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‘the father’: film review | sundance 2020.

Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman play a dementia-afflicted man and his daughter in 'The Father,' Florian Zeller's screen adaptation of his own play.

By Todd McCarthy

Todd McCarthy

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The best film about the wages of aging since  Amour  eight years ago,  The Father  takes a bracingly insightful, subtle and nuanced look at encroaching dementia and the toll it takes on those in close proximity to the afflicted. Fronted by a stupendous performance from Anthony Hopkins as a proud Englishman in denial of his condition, this penetrating work marks an outstanding directorial debut by the play’s French author Florian Zeller and looks to be a significant title for Sony Classics domestically later in the year.

First performed in France in 2012, the play has elicited hosannas wherever it has appeared, notably in Paris, where it won the 2014 Moliere Award for best play, in the U.K. from 2014 to 2016, and in New York, where Frank Langella won a Tony Award for his lead performance in 2016. Christopher Hampton did the English adaptation and receives co-screenwriting credit here.

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However, even as Zeller has remained faithful to himself in switching media, he has embellished his work with some keen visual elements that expand upon what was possible onstage and prove both disquieting and meaningful in conveying the experience of dementia. The film thereby deserves to be analyzed as a freshly conceived work in its own right, not just a transfer from one medium to another.

“I don’t need you. I don’t need anyone,” barks Anthony (Hopkins, his name being the same as his character’s) as his daughter Anne ( Olivia Colman ) tries to give him some simple assistance. Anthony lives in a handsome London flat, but she has some disruptive news to announce: She’s about to leave to live in Paris, a prospect that launches the old man into a disbelieving tirade until he switches gears and asks, “What’s going to become of me?”

What’s clear is that Anthony can’t be left on his own. Still sharp in some ways, he nonetheless forgets things and people, although he won’t admit it. Sometimes he speaks softly and coherently enough to make you believe he still knows what’s going on; at other times he’s disoriented or possibly playing little games to make it look like he’s more in control than he really is. He is, in a phrase, in and out.

All the same, everyone knows where things are inevitably headed. Early on, Anne’s presumed husband (Mark Gatiss) turns up to suggest that Anthony’s got to get out because it’s not actually his flat. Not long after, another man, Paul (Rufus Sewell), materializes as Anne’s husband, and it’s not a case of polygamy. When an attractive new nurse/caregiver Laura (Imogen Poots) reports for duty, the old man unleashes such compliments that she can’t help but remark to Anne how charming the old man is. “Not always,” she warns.

In company and for short periods, Anthony can be spry and lucid to the point that newcomers might be convinced that he’s not so badly off. But any prolonged exposure to him removes any question of his capacity to be left to his own devices.

Significantly elevating the film’s insight into the old man’s impaired lucidity is some very understated visual manipulation of the physical surroundings he inhabits. When Anthony at one point can’t find something he’s looking for, he asks if he’s actually in his own flat, and his daughter won’t answer. Viewers who have been watching carefully might notice very slight differences in the décor and layout, suggesting that perhaps he may not be where he thinks he is. 

These modest disruptions are, in fact, vital to the film’s meaning and ultimate impact, as they provide a visual correlative both to Anthony’s increasing uncertainty as to where he actually is, the truthfulness of his daughter and others when they speak with him and, ultimately, to the deterioration of his relationship with reality. Many films have attempted to convey alternative states of mind through many different means — swirling and distorted camerawork, psychedelic special effects, wild montages — but likely never has the invasion of memory loss been conveyed as profoundly as it is in  The Father.

Given the nature of the affliction itself, one knows that things aren’t going to get better, but as Anthony slips away from nearly all contact with reality another figure appears, that of a nurse, Catherine (Olivia Williams). The circumstances could not be more different, but the raging and manipulative old man with female offspring can hardly fail to bring to mind thoughts of  King Lear , if on a much smaller playing field.

This will certainly go down as one of Hopkins’ great screen performances and the younger crew all deport themselves with customary skill and authority. The film will also open the door for Zeller to transition to film directing as much as he might wish.  The Father  is sharp, teasingly diabolical and, most of all, an account of an insidious disease that’s deadly on point.

Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Premieres)

Opens: 2020

Production: Embankment Films, Trademark Films, F comme Film

Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Olivia Colman, Mark Gatiss, Imogen Poots, Rufus Sewell, Olivia Williams, Ayesha Dharker

Director: Florian Zeller

Screenwriters: Christopher Hampton, Florian Zeller, based on the play Le pere by Florian Zeller

Producers: Simon Friend, Christophe Spadone, Philippe Carcassonne, Jean-Louis Livi, David Parfitt

Executive producers: Lauren Dark, Ollie Madden, Daniel Battsek, Hugo Grumbar, Tim Haslam, Paul Grindey, Zygi Kamasa

Director of photography: Ben Smithard

Production designer: Peter Francis

Costume designer: Anna Mary Scott Robbins

Editor: Yorgos Lamprinos

Music: Ludovico Einaudi

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‘King Richard’ Review: Father Holds Court

Will Smith and Aunjanue Ellis play the parents of Venus and Serena Williams in a warm, exuberant, old-fashioned sports drama.

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By A.O. Scott

The climactic scenes in “King Richard” take place in 1994, as Venus Williams, 14 years old and in her second professional tennis match, faces Arantxa Sánchez-Vicario , at the time the top-ranked player in the world. If you don’t know the outcome, you might want to refrain from Googling. And even if you remember the match perfectly, you might find yourself holding your breath and full of conflicting emotion as you watch the director Reinaldo Marcus Green’s skillful and suspenseful restaging.

You most likely know what happened next. Venus and her younger sister Serena went on to dominate and transform women’s tennis, winning 30 Grand Slam singles titles between them (plus 14 doubles titles as a team) and opening up the sport to aspiring champions of every background. (They are credited as executive producers of this film.) You might also know that those achievements fulfilled an ambition that their father, Richard Williams, had conceived before Venus and Serena were born.

In the years of their ascent, he was a well-known figure, often described with words like “controversial,” “outspoken” and “provocative.” “King Richard” aims in part to rescue Williams from the condescension of those adjectives, to paint a persuasive and detailed picture of a family — an official portrait, you might say — on its way to fame and fortune.

In modern Hollywood terms, the movie might be described as a two-for-one superhero origin story, in which Venus (Saniyya Sidney) takes command of her powers while Serena (Demi Singleton) begins to understand her own extraordinary potential, each one aided by a wise and wily mentor. But this is a fundamentally — and I would say marvelously — old-fashioned entertainment, a sports drama that is also an appealing, socially alert story of perseverance and the up-by-the-bootstraps pursuit of excellence.

It’s also a marriage story. When we first meet them, in the early 1990s, Richard (Will Smith) and his wife, Oracene (Aunjanue Ellis), are living with five daughters in a modest bungalow-style house in Compton, Calif. He works nights as a security guard, and she’s a nurse. Their shared vocation, though — the enterprise that is the basis of their sometimes fractious partnership — is their children.

This is an all-consuming task: to bring up confident, successful Black girls in a world that is determined to undervalue and underestimate them. Tennis, which Richard chose partly because of its whiteness and exclusivity, is only part of the program.

The children — Tunde (Mikayla Lashae Bartholomew), Lyndrea (Layla Crawford) and Isha (Daniele Lawson), along with Venus and Serena — lead highly structured, intensely monitored lives. (A disapproving neighbor calls the authorities, convinced that Richard and Oracene are being too hard on the girls.) This is partly protective, a way of keeping them away from what Richard ominously calls “these streets” — a menace represented by the hoodlums who harass Richard and the girls during practice sessions — but it also reflects his temperament and philosophy.

He likes slogans and lessons, at one point forcing the family to watch Disney’s “Cinderella” to teach the importance of humility. “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail” is one of his favorite mottos. There is nothing haphazard or sloppy about “King Richard,” and it succeeds because it has a clear idea about what it wants to accomplish. The script, by Zach Baylin, is sometimes unapologetically corny — if you took a drink every time the Williams sisters say “yes, Daddy” you’d pass out before Venus won her first junior match — but the warmth and verve of the cast make the sentimentality feel earned.

Smith, digging into Williams’s Louisiana accent and mischievous sense of humor, plays the character as a kindred soul of sorts — a charmer with a strategy. The white men who dominate the tennis world see him at first as someone to be brushed off or patronized. Later, when confronted with the undeniable and potentially lucrative fact of Venus’s talent, they are surprised to discover that Richard’s agenda doesn’t always align with theirs. Against the advice of two top coaches, he pulls Venus off the junior tournament circuit. He is unpersuaded by agents, sneaker executives and others who claim to have his daughters’ best interests at heart.

They see him, sometimes with affection, as stubborn and unreasonable, but he’s usually right. The film’s treatment of the coaches Paul Cohen (a suave, tan Tony Goldwyn) and Rick Macci (a manic, mustachioed Jon Bernthal) is gracious and skeptical. They are neither saviors nor villains, but rather men whose stake in the tennis system limits their perspectives. (The white tennis parents, on the other hand, are a pretty awful bunch, encouraging their children to cheat and berating them when they lose.) The coaches can see Venus and Serena’s potential as athletes, but only within the parameters of a status quo that the sisters will soon demolish.

That, too, is part of Richard’s plan. But if “King Richard” were just the streamlined chronicle of his triumph — if there weren’t at least a twinkle of irony in the title — it wouldn’t be convincing. Smith shows his usual, disarming skill at tactical self-deprecation, but it’s Ellis and Sidney who provide the necessary complexity. Venus, after all, is the center of the narrative: it’s not only her career but also her growing independence and self-awareness that keep us interested in what happens next.

And it’s Oracene who stands as the film’s crucial internal critic, the person who can challenge Richard’s sloganeering, bring him down to earth, and point out his failings. At times, this can seem like too much of a burden. Fairly late in the movie, she lays into Richard about his failed business and the children he has had with other women — all of it new information for the viewer, none of it ever mentioned again. The scene is not powerful because it exposes less-than-admirable aspects of Richard’s character, but because it shows how raw, messy and difficult even an apparently functional and harmonious marriage can be. (It also may foretell Richard and Oracene’s eventual divorce, in 2002.)

In the best Hollywood tradition, “King Richard” stirs up a lot of emotion while remaining buoyant and engaging. It’s serious but rarely heavy. Richard’s advice to his daughters when they step out on the court is to have fun, and Green (whose credits include the impressive “Of Monsters and Men” ) takes that wisdom to heart. This one’s a winner.

King Richard Rated PG-13. Brief violence, and some swear words and racial slurs. Running time: 2 hours 18 minutes. In theaters and on HBO Max .

A.O. Scott is a co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

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Screen Rant

The father review: florian zeller's directorial debut is an effective drama.

The Father dives deep into the mind, delivering an engaging film that is unsettling, achingly sad, and is strengthened by Zeller’s assured narrative.

Florian Zeller makes his directorial debut with The Father , which he adapts to the screen with Christopher Hampton and is based on Zeller’s own play. With an utterly captivating and heartbreaking performance from Anthony Hopkins anchoring the film, this drama about a traumatized man with dementia is breathtaking and emotional. Zeller compartmentalizes and explores the titular character’s pain, caught in the midst of his deteriorating memory while grasping onto anything he can remember. The Father dives deep into the mind, delivering an engaging film that is unsettling, achingly sad, and is strengthened by Zeller’s assured narrative.

The film is primarily told from the perspective of Anthony (Hopkins), who becomes disoriented, angry, and frustrated when he recalls specific memories that don’t seem to line up with what he’s being told. The audience sees his interactions with several people — his daughter Anne (Olivia Colman), his caretaker Laura (Imogen Poots), a mysterious man he can't identify at first (Rufus Sewell) — but it becomes increasingly clear that Anthony is experiencing several moments in time at once. It makes it hard to keep track of what’s real, what’s present, and who’s who, with Anthony often speaking to someone he believes is Anne and her husband, though they’re played in these scenes by different actors. Facts from his and his daughter's life blurs for Anthony and he’s never sure whether Anne is divorced, married, moving to Paris to be with someone, or what they’re having for dinner. In the midst of his growing confusion are moments of clarity, tinged with feelings of intense sadness and a possessiveness that underscores a lack of control as Anthony’s mind slips further. 

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Zeller delivers a confident directorial debut, deftly navigating the cognitive space to engage with Anthony's befuddlement while referencing a couple of story points that make clear what is and isn't happening (though it needs a rewatch to study the thrilling ways in which Zeller sets up and explores the story). The Father has all the trappings of a play adapted to film — the use of a limited setting, with the characters moving in and out of house rooms and, later, inside a nursing home facility. However, it never feels constrained by them. Rather, Zeller employs the space to heighten the disconcertment and confusion. A seemingly spacious apartment is no longer welcoming, but alarmingly claustrophobic the more Anthony realizes something just isn't right.

Moments of Anthony looking out the window, as though waiting for someone or wanting to escape the confines of his deteriorating cognition, are nicely paired with scenes that convey the exact opposite. As an example, Anthony is incredibly possessive of his home and watch, fearing the loss of both and quickly turning accusatory whenever the reasoning goes against what he believes. While the audience is swept away into the maze of Anthony’s mind, the more grounded moments in The Father stem from Colman’s Anne, who is patient, loving, and fraying at the edges, caught between maintaining her strength and crying as she watches her father deteriorate. Colman, as always, is exceptional. While the film isn’t focused on her as much as Anthony, her emotions are equally on display. 

What The Father does astoundingly well is portray Anthony as a fully realized character. The film isn't interested in a story that emotionally manipulates its audience and forces them to merely sympathize with this man. Zeller accomplishes what Viggo Mortensen could not in Falling , another film about a man with dementia and his son trying to help him. Here, Zeller provides a character study while engaging with a story that feels as fractured as Anthony's mind, all without excusing the man's behavior or, in some cases, trying to understand it beyond the scope of the story. Anthony is charming and fun, but also deeply cruel and malicious, spitting hurtful words at Anne while comparing her to her sister, angrily yelling at Laura and mocking her upbeat intonation. Hopkins' portrayal is brilliant, seamlessly moving from one emotion to another, conveying devastating loss, befuddlement, and the distinctive terror that accompanies his slipping hold on his mind and memories. To watch him as he begins to understand what's going on is riveting and gut-wrenching all at once. 

The Father is deep and meaningful, with Zeller more than willing to dive into Anthony’s psyche, as well as explore his relationships without it ever feeling like the audience is being spoon fed information or forced to sympathize just for the sake of it. The film expertly weaves together a fantastic character exploration of a man whose mind is no longer in his control, all while it builds towards the reveal of a mysterious, traumatic time. Zeller is a confident filmmaker and, if The Father is any indication, viewers should keep an eye out for his work in the future. 

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The Father is in theaters March 12 and is available on premium video on demand beginning March 26. The film is 97 minutes long and rated PG-13 for some strong language and thematic material. 

Let us know what you thought of the film in the comments!  

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The Father review – a work of empathic genius

There are very few film experiences like Florian Zeller’s The Father . He has made a film, based on his play, that has cleverly communicated the feelings of our beloved, older adult relatives in a freshly structured way. He takes you inside the mind of a dementia patient experiencing so much emotionally raw pain and then receiving such tender mercy. His film is devastating and narratively brilliant. It’s one of the very best films of 2020.

An older adult male, a charming gentleman named Anthony (Anthony Hopkins), is having memory lapses. His daughter, Anna (Olivia Colman), is worried about him. He is, as Katherine Hepburn would say, a stubborn “old poop,” who refuses any help she graciously and tirelessly sets up for him. Anna is in desperate need of help since she is leaving for France soon with her new husband, Paul (played by Dark City ‘s Rufus Sewell).

Anthony gets agitated quickly and charming the next, all while firing the staff (one played by The Art of Self-Defense’s Imogen Poots) and even getting physically aggressive when the agitation comes back. He wants to make amends with his daughter when she comes back home, but when she does come home, Anne is a similar-looking, but completely different person ( Rushmore’s Olivia Williams, a brilliant piece of casting). He begins to question his sanity, his family’s intentions, and even what is real and what isn’t.

Zeller, a renowned playwright who has been called the most exciting one of our time, wrote The Father as a play that went on to massive acclaim. He teamed up with Christopher Hampton (Academy Award-nominated for Dangerous Liaisons ), an esteemed playwright on his own, to write the finest adaptation this year. It’s highly intricate and wickedly clever in its structure. The world they have created is like getting caught up in a giant mindfuck of his brain’s doing; like endless hotel room floors and every door leads to a new hallway.

The acting here is exceptional and why wouldn’t it be? With Anthony Hopkins, his portrayal of a man whose brain is not firing on all cylinders is completely riveting. It’s so deeply felt and moving it will bring the most cynical of us to tears or, at least, leave a giant grapefruit-sized lump to your throat. It may be his finest performance in a long line of great ones.

The rest of the cast does a fine job listening and reacting to every one of Hopkin’s words and actions. Olivia Colman is in fine form and she is responsible for most of the “straight” acting scenes Hopkins plays off of. I also want to mention Williams, who may be the closest thing a film has to a closer in baseball. Her performance brings a calming and tender influence that has the viewer walk away with awe-inspiring satisfaction. It’s a tricky role and it brings a great sense of closure to the film.

The entire film is a magic trick; a dangerous, mature, and cunning movie-making adroitness that would make Keyser Söze give a Mr. Mayagi nod of appreciation (yes, I went for two wildly different film references there). For Zeller to have the dexterity to accomplish what he did here is a gift. To let his work, for a second, pass you by before it’s too late would be a tragedy.

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Article by Marc Miller

Marc Miller (also known as M.N. Miller) joined Ready Steady Cut in April 2018 as a Film and TV Critic, publishing over 1,600 articles on the website. Since a young age, Marc dreamed of becoming a legitimate critic and having that famous “Rotten Tomato” approved status – in 2023, he achieved that status.

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