the father movie review

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 .

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

Cinematographer

Ben Smithard
Christopher Hampton
Florian Zeller

Writer (play)

Ludovico Einaudi
Yorgos Lamprinos

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Led by stellar performances and artfully helmed by writer-director Florian Zeller, The Father presents a devastatingly empathetic portrayal of dementia.

With Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman delivering some of the best work of their careers, The Father does a heartbreakingly effective job of realistically depicting dementia.

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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’ Review: A Capricious Mind

Anthony Hopkins gives a scalding performance as a man stricken by dementia in this clever drama.

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‘The Father’ | Anatomy of a Scene

The director florian zeller narrates a sequence from his film featuring anthony hopkins, olivia colman and olivia williams.

I’m Florian Zeller, the director of The Father. This point of the story almost at the end of the film takes place just after a dream sequence. We were with Anthony, the main character, during the night. And suddenly, he’s hearing a voice and following that voice. And that voice is coming from a cupboard. And he opens the cupboard, and it leads to a hospital corridor. And then it looks like the morning. We see Anthony’s daughter, Olivia Colman, in the kitchen. And Anthony is just getting up. And he sees the same cupboard that he has seen in the dream, and he wants to check. And he opens the cupboard, and we see that it’s just a regular cupboard. And it’s a way to lead to reality. “’You’ve got a visitor today. Do you remember? Do you remember, dad?’” “’How could I forget? You never stop talking about it.’” They are talking about this carer that is supposed to come to work with and to take care of Anthony. And she is Laura. We have seen her previously in the film. And we know her as Imogen Poots. And it was a joyful and sunny young carer. And we’re waiting for her to appear. “’She seems really nice. I mean, sweet and efficient. I think she’ll look after you well.’” “’I like her.’” “’Good.’” [LAUGHING] What I try to do in The Father is to put the audience in a unique position as if the audience was going through a labyrinth. And as a viewer, we have to question everything we are seeing. We do not know what is real and what is not real. I wanted The Father to be not only a story, but an experience. The experience of what it could mean to lose everything, including your own bearings as a viewer. And I didn’t want the audience just to sit and to watch a story already told from the outside. I wanted to experience that story from the inside as if it was a way to experience a slice of dementia. So we are in the same position as the main character. We do not know more than he does. And what he thinks is reality, it is reality for us as a viewer. And certainly, you have to deal with contradictions in the narrative. And to me, it was very important because when you have to deal with contradictions, you have to find your own path to look for the meaning. And this is what I call being in an active position. To me, the film was like a puzzle. And you have to play with all the pieces of that puzzle to find the correct combination. “’Dad, why do you have to make everything so difficult? You can get dressed later. Don’t worry about it.’” “’I’d be mortified.’” “’No, you won’t.’” “’I will.’” And this is the very first time Anthony looks really like someone who doesn’t know anymore where he is. And so we are expecting Imogen Poots to appear. “’Anne, who’s this?’” “’Hello, Anthony.’” Suddenly, this is another actress. This is Olivia Williams. And we are again back in the same confusion as the main characters. We were certain that we knew where we were. And suddenly, the reality is again vanishing. “’Something doesn’t make sense about this.’” When Anthony says there is something that doesn’t make sense, this is exactly what you feel as a viewer because what I didn’t want for the audience is to be too comfortable. I wanted to play with that feeling of disorientation as a game in a way, meaning that to give you enough to believe that where you are to make that twist even more disturbing. Suddenly, this is not what you were expecting. [DOOR SLAMS] [MUSIC PLAYING]

By Jeannette Catsoulis

At once stupendously effective and profoundly upsetting, “ The Father ” might be the first movie about dementia to give me actual chills. On its face a simple, uncomfortably familiar story about the heartbreaking mental decline of a beloved parent, this first feature from the French novelist and playwright Florian Zeller plays with perspective so cleverly that maintaining any kind of emotional distance is impossible.

The result is a picture that peers into corners many of us might prefer to leave unexplored. When we first meet Anthony (Anthony Hopkins), a hale octogenarian ensconced in an upscale London flat, we’re primed to expect the kind of genteel entertainment Hopkins has long made his own. But Zeller, adapting (with Christopher Hampton) his acclaimed stage play , has nothing so cozy in mind; and when Anthony’s middle-aged daughter, Anne (Olivia Colman), arrives to tell him she’s moving to Paris to pursue a new relationship, his reaction escalates from bafflement to outright distress.

Anne is concerned. Anthony has just scared away his most recent caregiver after accusing her of theft, and a new one must be found. After Anne leaves, he hears a noise in the flat and discovers a strange man (Mark Gatiss) reading a newspaper. The man claims to be Anne’s husband, Paul, but isn’t Anne divorced? And why is the man saying Anthony is their guest? Confused and upset, Anthony is relieved to hear Anne return — only now she’s played by Olivia Williams and neither we nor Anthony recognize her. Later still, Rufus Sewell appears as a very different, much angrier Paul, one who will nudge the movie’s tone toward something more complicated and infinitely more dark.

Combining mystery and psychodrama, “The Father” is a majestic depiction of things falling away: People, surroundings and time itself are becoming ever more slippery. As if to enforce order on days that keep eluding him, Anthony clings obsessively to his watch. Morning turns to twilight in the space of a single breakfast exchange; conversation ceases whenever his second daughter, Lucy, is mentioned. And while the audience will be able to piece together the plot’s timeline, Zeller’s relentlessly subjective approach places us slap-bang in the middle of Anthony’s distorted memories. It’s a brutal, terrifyingly simple technique, backed by a production design that manipulates the details of his surroundings just enough to make us question where — and when — we are.

Whether as Lear or Lecter, Hopkins has never been an especially physical actor — most of the magic happens above the neck — but here he pushes his capacity for small, telling gestures and stillness to distressing limits. For Anthony, senility doesn’t creep, it pounces, and he responds by freezing until it retreats. When it doesn’t, his disorientation manifests in ways that require Hopkins to swerve, sometimes on a dime, from mischievous to enraged and from charming to laceratingly cruel. It’s an astonishing, devilish performance, one that turns a meeting with Anthony’s new caregiver (a terrific Imogen Poots) into a master class of manipulation.

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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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‘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.

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

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.

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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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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.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman in The Father (2020)

A man refuses all assistance from his daughter as he ages. As he tries to make sense of his changing circumstances, he begins to doubt his loved ones, his own mind and even the fabric of his... Read all A man refuses all assistance from his daughter as he ages. As he tries to make sense of his changing circumstances, he begins to doubt his loved ones, his own mind and even the fabric of his reality. A man refuses all assistance from his daughter as he ages. As he tries to make sense of his changing circumstances, he begins to doubt his loved ones, his own mind and even the fabric of his reality.

Florian Zeller
Christopher Hampton
Anthony Hopkins
Olivia Colman
Mark Gatiss
1K User reviews
319 Critic reviews
88 Metascore
37 wins & 168 nominations total

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Trivia Florian Zeller wanted Sir Anthony Hopkins specifically for the part. He sent Hopkins the script in 2017 and waited for a reply. In the meantime, he did not pursue production with any other actors in the lead role. He said if Hopkins had not agreed to the film, then it likely would have been made in French instead.

Anthony : Who exactly am I?

Connections Featured in CBC News: Toronto: Episode dated 18 September 2020 (2020)
Soundtracks Cold Wind Var. 1 - Day 1 Music by Ludovico Einaudi Piano: Ludovico Einaudi Violin/Viola: Federico Mecozzi Cello: Redi Hasa

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Apr 4, 2021
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February 26, 2021 (United States)
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Blythe House, 23 Blythe Road, West Kensington, London, Greater London, England, UK (Exterior scene: nursing home)
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Runtime 1 hour 37 minutes
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‘The Father’ Review: Anthony Hopkins Gives One of His Best Performances in This Heartbreaking Drama

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Dementia is its own world. Unmoored from setting, time, and identity, we can’t hope to be the people we always were because our identities rest on the fragile ground of memory and place. To watch a loved one enter this world and knowing they’ll never return to our own is painful and heart-wrenching. Florian Zeller ’s adaptation of his own play, The Father , explores this loss through thoughtful direction, careful storytelling, and yet another incredible performance from Anthony Hopkins . Yes, the film is overwhelmingly sad, but it’s never exploitative as its works tirelessly to empathize with a man who has become detached from his reality. The film calmly and quietly rejects rationality as we view the world through eyes that no longer understand what’s happening. Deeply empathetic and thoroughly moving, The Father refuses to offer easy solace in favor of embracing difficult truths.

Anthony (Hopkins) lives in a flat in London. With his brusque nature and ornery demeanor, he rejects caretakers much to the consternation of his daughter Anne ( Olivia Colman ). Anne can see that her father is slipping away, and Anthony’s behavior only serves to upset her, her husband Paul ( Rufus Sewell ), and anyone else who crosses the old man’s path. But Anthony’s confusion only deepens as time no longer seems to make sense, he can’t keep track of his location, his ceases to recognize the people around him, and yet he insists he can take care of himself. Slowly, Anthony’s world starts breaking down as he slips further into dementia.

The skill and craft of The Father is that Zeller never needs to “upend” reality or move towards the fantastical. Instead, he understands that to properly view the world from Anthony’s perspective is to purposefully confuse the audience based on facts they already have. So, for example, in one scene we meet Anne and she’s played by Olivia Colman, so we’ll grasp his confusion when Anne returns later and she’s played by Olivia Williams . The basic facts—Anthony has a daughter named Anne who checks in on him—are the same, but he can no longer recognize his daughter, but pretends that everything is okay because he knows if he starts accusing her of being someone else, they’ll think he’s mad. Anthony is forced to play along with his own dementia in order to hide the depths of his illness.

the-father-olivia-colman-anthony-hopkins

Zeller also uses subtle touches throughout like keeping the framing perpendicular and steady, but changing the setting so that even if Anthony is supposed to be in a doctor’s office, it has the same shape, structure, and right angles of his flat, which adds to the audience’s sense of subtle disorientation. Anthony is home, but not home, and everything kind of blurs together not through hyper-stylized visuals, but through a slow chipping away. What makes The Father so unnerving is how quietly Zeller plays it. Every change comes in without announcing itself, and the confidence of those changes further disorient Anthony’s reality.

All of these consequences pulse with life due to Hopkins’ rich and tragic performance. Hopkins and Zeller make the bold choice not to have Anthony be “likable”—he’s frequently callous with the feelings of others and pushes back against any attempts at assistance—but to still make us empathize with his condition. We can see through Hopkins that Anthony is driven by fear, that fear leads to him lashing out, and he’s fighting to assert any control he can on a world that he no longer understands. In this one character, Hopkins has to span the chasm between domineering father to scared child, and he does it with total command and credibility. In a career filled with memorable performances, his work in The Father is among his best.

He’s surrounded by an excellent cast with Colman’s presence proving essential to making the film function. This story belongs to Anthony, but Colman gives us so much as Anne to see how her father’s deterioration wears on her and how she tries to put on a brave face. You can also tell so much about Anne’s life just through the little moments Colman gives us like her deflation every time Anthony compares her to her sister, or the way Anne lights up at an innocuous compliment from her father. What makes this such a rich performance is how Colman allows us to see Anne not just in relation to her father’s dementia, but the totality of their relationship even though the film itself keeps its focus on Anthony’s twilight years. To say so much without the use of flashbacks or heavy exposition is remarkable.

The Father is not an easy watch, especially for anyone who has ever watched the mental deterioration of a parent or grandparent, but it’s never exploitative or callous. The film is heartbreaking and sorrowful because that’s the reality of the situation. The cruelty doesn’t come from Anthony or those around him; the cruelty is time itself. Zeller steadfastly refuses simple catharsis or a moment of clarity where all can be healed between Anthony and Anne. But the film is oddly beautiful in how unflinching it is, showing a deep love for Anthony even when he’s at his worst, even when he’s mostly gone.

The Father will be released in U.S. theaters on December 18th.

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The Father movie review & film summary (2021)
The Father movie review & film summary (2021)
The Father (2020)
The Father movie review: Anthony Hopkins' astonishing performance
The Father Movie Review: An Intensely Brilliant Anthony Hopkins Walks
The Father

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COMMENTS

The Father movie review & film summary (2021) | Roger Ebert
Reviews. The Father. Drama. 97 minutes ‧ PG-13 ‧ 2021. Christy Lemire. February 25, 2021. 5 min read. 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.”
The Father - Rotten Tomatoes
What to Know. Critics Consensus. Led by stellar performances and artfully helmed by writer-director Florian Zeller, The Father presents a devastatingly empathetic portrayal of dementia....
'The Father' review: Anthony Hopkins at his devastating best ...
Oscar winners Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman lead the cast of "The Father," an examination of the shattering impact of dementia.
‘The Father’ Review: A Capricious Mind - The New York Times
Combining mystery and psychodrama, “The Father” is a majestic depiction of things falling away: People, surroundings and time itself are becoming ever more slippery.
‘The Father’: Film Review - The Hollywood Reporter
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...
The Father Reviews - Metacritic
On the residential streets of affluent London, Anne visits her father Anthony in his apartment. The 80-year-old man is saddened when his daughter announces an imminent move to Paris to join the man she loves and asks him what will become of him.
'The Father' Review: Anthony Hopkins Gives a Tour-de-Force ...
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.
Movie Review: 'The Father' - NPR
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.
The Father (2020) - IMDb
With Olivia Colman, Anthony Hopkins, Mark Gatiss, Olivia Williams. A man refuses all assistance from his daughter as he ages. As he tries to make sense of his changing circumstances, he begins to doubt his loved ones, his own mind and even the fabric of his reality.
The Father Review: Anthony Hopkins Is at His Best in ...
Read Matt Goldberg's The Father review; Florian Zeller's movie stars Anthony Hopkins, Olivia Colman, Rufus Sewell, and Olivia Williams.