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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.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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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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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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The Father Reviews

Trigger warning: do not watch “The Father” (2020) if you are unprepared to be completely gutted and devastated. Side effects may include life altering change in perspective and emerging fear of aging in the US.

Full Review | Jun 3, 2024

The Father is a film that punches you straight in the gut. You’ll never be able to forget this one.

Full Review | Apr 23, 2024

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

The Father Review

A career-capping tour-de-force from anthony hopkins..

The Father is now available on premium VOD.

The Father is the first film by 41-year-old playwright Florian Zeller, though it feels like the work of a seasoned master in his twilight years. Based on Zeller’s French-language play Le Père and its English translation by Christopher Hampton — Zeller and Hampton also co-wrote the screenplay — the story follows retired London engineer Anthony (Anthony Hopkins) down a rabbit-hole of progressive memory loss, as his daughter Anne (Olivia Colman) attempts to care for him. The film turns its limited sets and spaces into a reflection of Anthony’s increasingly askew perceptions, filling the soundscape with the haunting strings of composer Ludovico Einaudi, and the disembodied echoes of conversations past. It’s a masterwork of both technical filmmaking and soulful drama, packed into a brisk 97 minutes that feels, by design, both like an eternity and like fleeting moments slipping through your fingers like water.

The Father has racked up six Oscar nominations . Its recognition in these categories — Best Picture, Actor, Supporting Actress, Adapted Screenplay, Editing, and Production Design — feels indicative of its precise assembly and conception. What the Oscars do and don’t get “right” is a matter of taste, but for an under-discussed, under-exposed contender like The Father, the nominations alone feel like justice served, regardless of who ends up winning. The Best Actor trophy will likely be awarded to the late Chadwick Boseman (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom), and rightly so, but The Father also features a performance for the history books by the legendary Hopkins, who, at the age of 82, delivers arguably the most riveting work of his already storied career, a performance made all the more powerful by the way it’s framed.

What separates The Father from other films about aging is, for lack of a better word, its gimmick. The film seems to skip around in time as if to capture jumbled memories half-recalled, but it also roots its narrative in a singular, linear present, following Anthony across what feels like a couple of days, at least to him. It’s told mostly through his unreliable point of view, one filled with paranoia and frustration at the world around him, and at what he perceives as lies and patronizing deceptions. Before long, the film takes a sharp turn into eerie territory by suddenly recasting central roles, like Anthony’s daughter (Colman is, at one point, swapped out for Olivia Williams). A mysterious man even appears in his apartment — sometimes played by Mark Gatiss, other times by Rufus Sewell — claiming to be his son-in-law, and claiming that the apartment isn’t Anthony’s at all. It’s a trick so effective at robbing Anthony, and the viewer, of the luxury of recognition that you’re left wondering why more filmmakers don’t use it.

Zeller’s directing is economic — nearly every shot has a dual purpose, delivering emotional information through performance, and factual information framed in its peripheries — but it’s also fundamentally untrustworthy, placing us within Anthony’s headspace as he attempts to grasp his surroundings. When Anthony mentions some event or line of dialogue from earlier in a scene, the other characters suddenly have no idea what he’s talking about. If the film didn’t occasionally step back to present an “objective” vantage, it would feel like surrealist horror. Details subtly shift in his apartment, first in ways you don’t quite notice, but then in more sweeping and obvious ways that don’t make logical sense. The film features only a handful of locations, but it presents them remarkably, re-dressing and re-painting what appears to be a single set, so that as the story progresses, everything feels, at once, both alien and familiar.

Hopkins captures this conflict of perspective in heartbreaking fashion. In one moment, Anthony is bound by his convictions and has a temper to match them; “I am not leaving my flat!” he bellows, at the mere suggestion of assisted living. In the next moment, all sense of certainty slips away from him, which he tries desperately to conceal beneath a brittle veneer of confidence. His sentences begin with agreements, like “Ah, yes”, “Of course!” and “That’s right,” but the shudder in his voice, and the far-away look in his eyes, betray terror and self-pity.

However, Hopkins doesn’t simply play the dementia. Anthony isn’t his disease, but a fully formed person whose experiences and muddled memories keep fighting back against it, and against his fears of abandonment. As soon as he’s lucid, he takes immediate advantage of his physical and emotional clarity. For instance, when Anne introduces him to his new caretaker Laura (Imogen Poots), he jokes around and regales her with tall tales, and he even puts on a little tap dance, as if to overcompensate and prove just how in charge of his faculties he really is (finally, a film that taps into the wildly zany energy Hopkins brings to Instagram ). But there’s a devastating irony even to his idiosyncrasies. The first thing you notice about Anthony — in fact, the first thing he’ll tell you — is how much he loves his wristwatch. It helps him keep track of his day and his routine, but it’s something he’s begun to misplace on a regular basis. Time itself is slipping away from him.

The film’s editing (by Yorgos Lamprinos) collapses days, minutes, hours, perhaps even months, into singular moments, as if no time has passed at all. Sometimes, the film even contorts chronology, as Anthony recalls conversations that haven’t happened yet or characters he’s yet to meet. This wouldn’t be possible without a sci-fi wrinkle in a straightforward narrative, but in The Father, it begs the question as to what we’re actually watching. A film, after all, is a memory of sorts — a reflection of past events unfolding in the present — and the more The Father goes on, the more it feels like the increasingly entangled recollections of a demented mind, where names, faces, and events are slotted in for one another if they’re remembered at all.

Anthony Hopkins' Best Movies

Even if his career began and ended with Hannibal Lecter, Sir Anthony Hopkins would still be considered one of the definitive actors of our era. Luckily, the role of Hannibal only scratches the surface of Hopkins' long illustrious career. He's equally adept at playing the hero or villain; the leader of men or the lowly servant. And this range has served him well over the decades.

Witnessing events through Anthony’s eyes is often confusing and terrifying, but it becomes deeply upsetting in the rare moments the film slips out of his perspective, and into Anne’s. Colman plays a subdued counterfoil to the unpredictable Hopkins; where Anthony veers between jovial, brash, fussy, and distressed, Anne is forced to remain centered and calm, even as she navigates the realization that her father views her with suspicion and disdain. She barely keeps her head above water, and Colman wrestles, in grueling fashion, between a smiling, personable front and feeling piercing betrayal — which Anne chooses not to fully express. What would be the point, since Anthony seldom remembers the ways in which he hurts her?

As the scenes progress, and the film even loops back on itself on occasion, it’s hard not to wonder where a story like The Father is headed, or how it could possibly wrap up. It is, by nature, a tale of irrevocable, inevitable tragedy, with no relief or redemption in sight. However, its final scenes prove to be a stunning, soul-wrenching statement on memory, and its inherent contradiction as something both towering and impermanent.

Hopkins, in these closing moments, reaches deep into the depths of loneliness and despair. As an actor, he’s spent decades deconstructing human decisions and the ways people change, in increments. The skill with which he transitions from one thought or emotion to the next — reacting, considering, and feeling so fully as to seldom need words — makes him one of western cinema’s greatest performers. The Father is his magnum opus, allowing him to carefully strip away all dignity and civility from Anthony until all that’s left is a collection of primal impulses, and a living document of love, and care, at its most brutally difficult

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Let's have a look at the films released in 2021 that were scored the best of the best by IGN's critics. But first, a few notes: IGN rates its movies on a scale of 0-10. The "best reviewed" movies listed here all scored 8 or above. The IGN review scale labels any film scored 9 as "amazing" and 10 as "masterpiece".

The Father is a devastating masterwork by first-time director Florian Zeller, based on his play Le Père. The film follows an old man with dementia (Anthony Hopkins) and manipulates its editing and set design until you can longer trust your perceptions — much like its main character. It features career-best work from all involved, including Hopkins, as a man trying desperately to cling to his old life, and Olivia Colman as his daughter, who cares for him at great personal cost.

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Ign recommends.

Review: With a great Anthony Hopkins, 'The Father' is a haunting exploration of dementia

What would it feel like to not recognize your own daughter? Or find your home oddly becoming a place of strange discomfort? While movies often tackle the effects of dementia or Alzheimer’s on patients and their families, director Florian Zeller’s drama “The Father” reaches new heights by putting its audience up close and very personal with the confusion and palpable terror of losing one’s memory.

With exceptional filmmaking and Anthony Hopkins ’ best performance since “Nixon,” “The Father” (★★★★ out of four; rated PG-13; in New York and LA theaters Friday, expanding nationwide March 12, on video on demand March 26) is an immersive character study of an elderly man struggling to rationalize his existence as he loses his grip on the people and things around him. But it’s also a moving exploration of how children become caretakers for their parents, with Olivia Colman turning in a standout role as a daughter weighing the hard decision about whether to live her own life or give it up for her dad.

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'It feels like a horror film': New dementia dramas 'Falling,' 'Supernova' aim for truthfulness over tears

Zeller weaves in elements of psychological horror and even a mystery component to put his main character (and us) on edge constantly, and while the drama goes to some disturbing places (including incidents of elder abuse), at its core it is very much about love and the power of empathy.

Played by Hopkins, Anthony (yep, that's the on-screen elder gentleman's name, too) is an 80-year-old Londoner living in a posh apartment. He listens to classical music, has a favorite watch that doubles as a security blanket of sorts, yet can’t fend for himself anymore due to his ailing mental health. He also has a tendency to roll through caregivers, having threatened his last one, and Anthony’s daughter Anne (Colman) wants him to meet a new nurse because she’s soon moving to Paris with a new love. “You’re abandoning me. What is going to become of me?” a visibly freaked-out Anthony says.

Soon after she leaves, he’s in the kitchen, hears a door slam and confronts a stranger (Mark Gatiss) sitting and reading a newspaper. This man Paul says he’s Anne’s husband, though this is news to Anthony. The old man suspects that Anne’s “cooking something” against him and wants to move him into a home, and his daughter comes through the door but it’s another woman (Olivia Williams) that he doesn’t recognize.

“The Father” just gets more unnerving from there as Anthony tries to make sense of it all while the film gradually reveals the cracks in his constantly shifting reality, and his personality veers wildly from moment to moment. When Anthony meets his new caregiver Laura (Imogen Poots), whom he thinks resembles his younger daughter Lucy, he flirts and does a little soft shoe yet on a dime turns on her and cruelly mentions that she shares Lucy’s “habit of laughing inanely.”

Hopkins is astounding when navigating all these various states of mind – from righteous anger to withering spitefulness to a child-like vulnerability – that play out as Anthony loses control of his life. Even though the part isn’t conventionally showy, Hopkins gets to touch every bit of the emotional spectrum and the result is as indelible a role as when Hopkins donned Hannibal’s mask and won an Oscar for “The Silence of the Lambs.”

Colman, a couple of years removed from taking best actress for “The Favourite,” is also understatedly superb as a woman dealing with all of this. And it all takes a toll: Paul (sometimes Gatiss, sometimes Rufus Sewell) resents Anthony’s presence and pushes Anne to do something about him, Anne has to smooth things over when Anthony insults his nurse, and most achingly, her father doesn’t even know who she is half the time.

Sneakily utilizing production design and uncanny good editing, “The Father” fascinatingly puts the viewer in the same state of distress as its main character. And in adapting his own play, the director’s carried over an intimate quality of a staged chamber drama to not just show a man dealing with dementia but also offer a way into his mind with a haunting, deeply affecting and quite memorable narrative.

'The Father' Review: Anthony Hopkins Gives One Of His Greatest Performances In One Of The Best Films Of 2020 [TIFF]

One of the main joys of film festivals is to go into a film knowing as little as possible, guided by the hopes that the programmers have selected something worthy of your time. I'd missed Florian Zeller's film The Father at its Sundance premiere, conflating it with another film about an ailing old-man as one of several dramas I skipped in order to focus on that fest's remarkable doc slate. At TIFF I was allowed to finally dig into this movie, and it's immediately become one of my favourite of this wild and troubled year. I've run out of ways to say "this film is best explored knowing nothing going in," but in this case the narrative structure is so integral to its success I can merely plead that you just trust this writer, give the film a shot, and hopefully you'll be as enthralled as I was. The review could end here – it's a masterpiece, with incredible performances, go in knowing nothing and prepare to have your mind blown. For those wanting a bit more (and, frankly, to conform to regular expectations for these review things), I can admit that this may be Anthony Hopkins' definitive role. His portrayal mixes bewilderment with a fierce, proud sense of certitude is Lear -like in its sophistication without ever a hint of overplaying to the back of the theatre. Olivia Colman exhibits once again her peerless capacity to portray frustration and pain with the most simple of glances, her patience tested throughout by her father's changing modes and capacities. The rest of the cast is equally laudable, from Ms. Williams, a second Olivia, who perfectly portrays the doppelgangerian aspect of the narrative. Mark Gatiss, Imogen Poots, and Rufus Sewell each rise to the heights of the lead performance, with bristling and nuanced takes throughout. Zeller's narrative shtick is by intent theatrical, and the claustrophobic setting and heightened circumstances certainly in lesser hands would have come across as "stagey". But to my immense delight, the film absolutely shines with these elements placed in the cinematic context, employing devices unique to the medium, from montage to near-invisible changes in set decoration and art direction – to take the tale's trick up to a level impossible on stage. It's through these unsettling moments that are purely cinematic, particularly through editing, that elevates Zeller's work from mere translation of his stageplay to big screen to something that feels fundamentally a story to be told through this medium. While Zeller's experience is obviously enormous, this is his debut film, and the result exhibits none of the reticence or even showiness that often results in these cases. Instead, we get a pitch perfect performance wrapped in a visually compelling presentation that employs throughout the unique techniques of moviemaking to elevate the narrative to previously unreachable heights. It's this collision of form and content that makes The Father so exhilarating, helping audiences through technique feel the same sense of discombobulation that the lead character is experiencing. We're meant to not only confront the fragmented structure, but made to feel our own sense of security slip away. It's unnerving while watching, it's gut-wrenching when one considers such a downfall is near inevitable for us all. The film leaves its mark by making us, briefly, consider not only our own mortality but our impending doom, for those lucky enough to make it that far along the race. Forget the local tragedy of his one family, this is a horror that may befit us all unless the end comes even sooner. This bleak and profound meditation on diminishing faculties results in a shattering work of cinema. I was left shaking with the results, drawn in completely to the film's shifts in tone and character, anchored throughout by Hopkin's impeccable performance. Truly a master work, the film illustrates as effectively as any how the mechanisms of art can be employed to amplify narrative, and how performances both broad and subtle can combine to deliver a symphony of emotions and moods. The Father truly is one of the greatest films of 2020, a timely and timeless tale that is deserving of far more attention than it's likely to get during these complicated times. /Film Rating: 9.5 out of 10

The Father Review

Back in 2000, a filmmaker named Christopher Nolan made his American debut with Memento , an emotionally brutal thriller about a man named Leonard who is unable to retain a memory for more than five minutes. What was startling about it was the way in which Nolan locks the viewer inside Leonard’s mind, so that you too greedily grab on to any morsel of information offered and eye other characters with suspicion. Now, 21 years later, another new director, this time a French playwright named Florian Zeller, is using a similar technique to equally striking effect. The hero of The Father is an octogenarian and has neither peroxide-blond hair nor visible tattoos, but he too is floundering desperately, unable to trust his own mind. And by adopting the perspective of a man with advanced dementia, Zeller has created a highly effective piece of POV filmmaking, a kind of horror film with a huge heart.

Anthony ( Anthony Hopkins ) is lost in a labyrinth. It’s a mental one: the various threads of his life keep slipping through his fingers. Where’s his watch? Is his daughter married? Is she moving to France? What’s happened to his other daughter? Is it morning or evening? Where’s that bloody watch? But as depicted here, it’s also a physical maze: as he negotiates the London flat in which he’s ensconced, the furniture keeps shifting, paintings vanishing from the walls, a piano morphing into a drinks cabinet. Zeller, adapting his own stage play, proves a natural at subverting filmic language to head-spinning effect. It’s unclear at all times exactly where Anthony is, or when he is.

It’s a tough watch, for sure, not least in the astonishing, tear-jerking final five minutes. But it’s also gripping and audacious.

Who he is is kept fuzzy, too. Conversations Anthony has with people lurch forward, frequently reversing when something he says is met with bafflement — “Of course,” he mutters repeatedly when corrected, though it’s heartbreakingly obvious that beneath his feigned comprehension is still abject confusion. Like Leonard in Memento , Anthony is hunting for clues to his own identity. And as portrayed by Hopkins in a powerhouse performance, one of the actor’s very best, he cycles through a vast range of emotion in 97 minutes, none of it feeling false. At one point the character is impishly charming, offering a whisky to his new carer and launching into a frenzied tap-dance. At another, his mood blackens, becoming horribly cruel. But mostly, he is lost, unmoored, searching desperately for a measure of control.

It’s a tough watch, for sure, not least in the astonishing, tear-jerking final five minutes. But it’s also gripping and audacious, twisting the conventions of narrative storytelling to match the awful effects of the disease it’s portraying. It offers no easy answers — there aren’t any. But it does offer plenty of compassion, both for the titular character and for his daughter, occasionally lingering with her, as played with low-key power by Olivia Colman , just long enough to make clear how much she’s struggling too. “I don’t need help from anyone,” Anthony barks at one point. But The Father makes clear that in this situation, all we can do is hang on to each other for dear life.

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In 'The Father,' Anthony Hopkins' Mind Is Playing Tricks On Him — And On You

Justin Chang

In The Father , Anthony Hopkins plays a man with dementia, and Olivia Coleman is the daughter whose name he occasionally forgets. Sean Gleason/Sony Pictures Classics hide caption

In The Father , Anthony Hopkins plays a man with dementia, and Olivia Coleman is the daughter whose name he occasionally forgets.

There have been many fine films over the past several years about characters struggling with the onset of Alzheimer's disease and dementia, like Away From Her , Still Alice and the recent Colin Firth / Stanley Tucci drama Supernova . But few of them have gone as deeply and unnervingly into the recesses of a deteriorating mind as The Father , a powerful new chamber drama built around a mesmerizing lead performance from Anthony Hopkins.

At this point in his long career, Hopkins would seem to have exhausted his ability to surprise us, but his work here is nothing short of astonishing. He shows us a man whose mind has become a prison, and we're trapped in it right alongside him.

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'we don't know what's coming': anthony hopkins plays 'the father' with dementia.

His character, also named Anthony, is 80 years old and has dementia. At the beginning of the movie, his daughter, Anne — played by the superb Olivia Colman — stops by his London apartment to check on him. Her father's condition has taken a turn for the worse, and his fits of temper have become severe enough to send his latest live-in nurse packing.

Anthony is stubborn and defiant and insists that he can manage on his own. But that's clearly not the case, given his habit of misplacing his things, like the watch that keeps mysteriously vanishing from his wrist, and his inability to remember names and faces, Anne's included.

Filmmaker Faces Her Father's Mortality By Staging His 'Death' Again And Again

As The Father goes on, the more it becomes clear that it's his own mind that's playing tricks on him. What makes the movie so unsettling is the way it wires us directly into his subjective experience, so that the foundations of the story seem to shift at random from scene to scene. We're adrift in a sea of Anthony's memories; each new plot development undermines the one before it.

A man suddenly appears in the apartment, claiming to be Anne's husband, which is odd, since just a few moments earlier, Anne seemed to be single. Anne goes out shopping for groceries, but when she returns, she's played not by Olivia Colman but by another actress, Olivia Williams.

The apartment itself, brilliantly designed by Peter Francis, begins to shift of its own accord. You notice puzzling discrepancies — wasn't there a lamp on that hallway table just a moment ago? Weren't those kitchen cabinets a completely different color? — and suddenly realize that Anthony's mind is blurring different time frames together. At some point, it becomes unclear whether we're in Anthony's apartment or Anne's apartment, into which Anthony has been moved since he can no longer live on his own.

The Father is thus both a psychological detective story and a stealth haunted-house movie. It's an exceedingly clever and polished piece of filmmaking, and it marks an impressive feature debut for the French writer-director Florian Zeller, adapting his own popular play with the veteran screenwriter Christopher Hampton .

You can sense how well this material must have worked on stage, where it's easier to slip between layers of reality. But it works beautifully onscreen, too. The general complaint about most stage-to-screen adaptations is that they wind up feeling too airless and claustrophobic. But those qualities are if anything a bonus in The Father , deepening its portrait of cognitive entrapment.

Code Switch

Portrait of a parent with alzheimer's.

Remarkably, none of the movie's dazzling surface tricks undermine the emotion at its core. The story in The Father may be scrambled, but it's also heartbreakingly simple: A man grows old and loses his memory, and his daughter, after a lifetime of love and devotion, must begin the long, agonizing process of saying goodbye.

Hopkins could deliver this performance on an empty soundstage with no loss of impact. He shows us Anthony's struggle to keep his wits about him, the way he reaches for humor — and then anger — as a means of keeping the inevitable at bay. By the end, though, his every last defense has been stripped away, and Hopkins lays the character bare with a vulnerability I've rarely seen from him or any actor. It's a devastating performance — and an impossible one to forget.

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The Father review – Anthony Hopkins superb in unbearably heartbreaking film

Hopkins gives a moving, Oscar-winning turn as a man with dementia in a film full of intelligent performances, disorienting time slips and powerful theatrical effects

“L et me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!” says King Lear, a plea which is overwhelmingly sad because it can never be heard by anyone with the power to grant it. Anthony Hopkins, who played Lear in Richard Eyre’s production for the BBC , now delivers another performance as an ailing patriarch with a favourite daughter and nowhere to stay, in a film directed by Florian Zeller, and adapted by Christopher Hampton from Zeller’s own award-winning stage play. There is unbearable heartbreak in this movie, for which Hopkins has become history’s oldest best actor Oscar-winner , and also genuine fear, like something you might experience watching Roman Polanski’s Repulsion or M Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense.

Hopkins is Anthony, a roguishly handsome and cantankerous old widower, a retired engineer who lives on his own in a spacious, well-appointed apartment in west London, receiving regular visits from his affectionate and exasperated daughter Anne, who is played at the highest pitch of intelligence and insight by Olivia Colman .

But things are very wrong, because Anthony has dementia. He is subject to mood-swings and fits of temper connected with his sudden terror at not being able to work out what is going on. His behaviour has already caused his existing carer to quit, and now Anne tells him that he simply has to get on with the new one, Laura (Imogen Poots). This is because Anne, after the end of her marriage to Paul (Rufus Sewell) – to whom we will be introduced later – has now at last found a new partner and the opportunity for happiness that she deserves. She is going abroad with him, and can’t look after Anthony any more.

What is deeply scary about The Father is that, without obvious first-person camera tricks, it puts us inside Anthony’s head. We see and don’t see what he sees and doesn’t see. We are cleverly invited to assume that certain passages of dialogue are happening in reality – and then shown that they aren’t. We experience with Anthony, step by step, what appears to be the incremental deterioration in his condition, the disorientating time slips and time loops. People morph into other people; situations get elided; the apartment’s furniture seems suddenly and bewilderingly to change; a scene which had appeared to follow the previous one sequentially turns out to have preceded it, or to be Anthony’s delusion or his memory of something else. And new people, people he doesn’t recognise (played by Mark Gatiss and Olivia Williams) keep appearing in his apartment and responding to him with that same sweet smile of patience when he asks what they are doing there. The universe is gaslighting Anthony with these people.

Imogen Poots, Olivia Colman and Hopkins.

Anthony is of course different from Lear in one particular: he doesn’t know what is happening to him, or has happened. Things are too far gone. But Hopkins shows how an awareness of his previous existence is still there at a deeper, almost physical level, sometimes resurfacing in his devastatingly contrite little apologies to Anne. And one scene with Paul in which Anthony becomes whimperingly afraid shows us that there are things that Anne doesn’t know about Anthony’s life.

Hopkins’s final speech to Williams is the one that reduced me to a blubbering mess. But the most subtly poignant moments are those in which Anthony will laugh – a flash of his old, roguishly charming self – and Anne and his carer will supportively laugh along with him. To some degree, it is a nervous laugh because Anne knows just how easily his mood can turn, and it is also a professional carer’s laugh, and a strained tragicomic laugh, the laugh you do instead of crying. But it’s also a perfectly genuine kind of laugh and, in its way, an urgent, shared gesture of faith in the person that Anthony was and occasionally still is.

The Father has something of Michael Haneke’s Amour in its one-apartment setting, and also something of Alan Ayckbourn’s 1985 stage-play Woman in Mind, in which the heroine retreats from reality. Its effects are essentially theatrical – but they are powerfully achieved, and the performances from Hopkins and Colman are superb. It is a film about grief and what it means to grieve for someone who is still alive.

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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.)

The Father film review: a portrait of dementia that pulls you into the eye of the storm

I confess, I deliberately swerved the 2012 stage play on which The Father is based. The play (co-written and directed by Florian Zeller , here making his film debut) is “about” dementia and mental decrepitude is not a topic I associate with thrills.

I stand corrected. Anthony ( Anthony Hopkins ) lives in a lawless Maida Vale mansion block. His scheming, violent daughter, Anne ( Olivia Colman ; staggeringly good), is married to the glowering, Duke of Cornwall-esque Paul (Rufus Sewell). Strangers constantly invade Anthony’s home and his new care worker (Imogen Poots) is a gurning fool.

At least, that’s how Anthony sees it.

Keep your eyes on the corridor lampshades and kitchen tiles (they keep changing). That, plus the ominous music, not to mention the camerawork (lots of uncanny tracking shots) make Anthony’s abode as scary as anything in The Shining.

By the way, he himself is terrifying.

Tons of Hollywood movies have told us what it’s like to have dementia, or love someone who has it. The Father does something different. It puts us in the eye of the storm and, on top of all that, finds a way to make the chaos funny. Anthony tells a doctor, “My daughter has a tendency to repeat herself. It’s an age thing.”

The Father is inherently democratic. As in the Iranian classic, A Separation, we’re encouraged to have sympathy for a caring woman who doesn’t want to be a carer, and for the low-paid worker, also female, (Olivia Williams; perfect), who will therefore have to pick up the slack.

It’s clearly a personal project. In the play, the protagonist is called “Andre”. Zeller changed it to Anthony, in honour of Hopkins. And surely it’s no coincidence that Zeller’s own son, Roman, is a member of the cast. Roman is a young boy seen happily kicking a plastic bag. His carefree presence sends a sad, if subliminal, message. Anne is burdened with Anthony. One day, Roman may be burdened with Zeller.

How do you care for ill people who will never get better and often don’t know they’re unwell? The Father is full of abyss-deep questions and, with its final scene, will probably make you cry harder than any other film this year.

While most of the cast and crew are British, Zeller is French, wrote the screenplay with the British writer Christopher Hampton (who has translated most of his plays) and the editor, Yorgos Lamprinos, is Greek. This international team playfully serve up humour, menace and tragedy. It’s a winning combination, blissful proof of what Europeans – when they stand together – can achieve.

97mins cert 12A. In cinemas

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‘The Father’: Anthony Hopkins Shows the Reality of Living With Dementia

By K. Austin Collins

K. Austin Collins

The Father , adapted from director Florian Zeller’s award-winning 2012 play, gives Anthony Hopkins a role designed to nearly break your heart: a role full of anger and displacement and uncertainty but, also, flashes of humor, a sprightly fullness of life. Reminders of who this man once was.

This is a film about dementia. It arrives fast on the heels of the Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth-led Supernova , in which a writer facing early onset dementia looks ahead to his future and sees only bleakness, a loss of everything that makes him who he is. The Father is, as its title may suggest, about an older man, Anthony (played by Hopkins), who is living out precisely the future Supernova seems to have in mind. It is a film about a man whose condition has left him vulnerable: to his confusion, to an encroaching lack of independence, and ultimately to time itself.

When the movie opens, Anthony is in trouble. His daughter, Anne ( Olivia Colman ), has gotten wind that her father has alienated yet another nurse. She’s quit. Anthony apparently called her a “little bitch,” Anne reports, and threatened her physically. Before that nurse, there were three others. This is a matter of growing urgency. Anne has a life to live. She’s moved her father into her flat to keep an eye on him (given the rate at which he’s running through nurses…), but the situation is no longer tenable. Yet, she feels, she cannot abandon him.

Conflicts of course ensue. The Father is as much about living with dementia as the afflicted as it is about caring for such a person and, in the process, seeing the slow whittling-away of their senses over time. It’s about what it feels like to see — from outside, from within — an inexplicable rip in the fabric of one man’s reality. Zeller’s conceit for the drama takes the adventurous, potentially even humane, step of having us experience all of this from Anthony’s perspective. Which is to say: time, in this movie, is a membrane. And the drama that plays out therein is full of slips of memory, confusions of identity, disorienting conflations of place and event. Anthony is a man who needs stability to make sense of his life.

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Denial, too, is a necessary ingredient. “I don’t need anyone,” Anthony says more than once. He also tells them all to fuck off. His is a personality that vibrates and switches — a personality which seems to have been playful, tricky, in the first place. Those moods now turn more often toward meanness, even viciousness. A new nurse, Laura (Imogen Poots), arrives and Anthony puts on something of a show, becomes a veritable charm-factory — drawing her in before cutting her down. A mistake may have been made in trying to obscure that the woman is a nurse. Despite his state, Anthony

His apartment — a gorgeous feat of design, courtesy of Peter Francis, that’s heightened by a theatrical lighting, a visually imposed sense of comfort in one moment and isolation in the next — is a sanctuary. So are particular objects, particular memories. Another daughter, a watch. But the films emphasis is on his slips of memory, his confusions of time, his mix-ups of identity. His is life full of disorienting conflations of place and event. Some of this is not a matter of his mind alone: there are indeed changes afoot in his life. But the film’s central effort, sometimes effectively, other times programmatically, to literalize this confusion.

The actors (whose ranks are filled out by Rufus Sewell, Mark Gatiss, and Olivia Williams) seem to switch roles. Or is that Anthony’s confusion? Rooms presented one way, in one scene, seem to change. Within this complex framework is a whirlwind of feelings anchored by Colman, whose pain is loud despite a performance predicated on quiet, and Hopkins, whose aging, sharp-witted Anthony proves only too human. What’s clear by the end of the film is that this must have been quite something to see on stage, where the confusions of the man’s mind must have proven all the more disorienting, outright destabilizing. As for the film: its sincerity is not to be doubted. The first time I watched it, I was bothered by its tricks, which tumble forward, unsettling us in ways that sometimes feel distracting for being so overt, so literal.

A second watch proved more moving, though, at times, the film still lags under the weight of its conceit, coming off less like an act of perspectival sympathy than as a trick being played on the audience — to say nothing of all the actorly tricks. The Oscar reels will certainly sizzle. The ending, depending on you, may come off as either too neat or appropriately revelatory. But the film’s emotions have a stark, memorable sheen.

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Alzheimer's drama has strong language and adult themes.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

The reality of suffering with Alzheimer's is portr

Anthony is shown to be smart, charming, and funny,

A character is slapped in the face a number of tim

Character remarks on another being "gorgeous."

Occasional language includes "f--k," "s--t," and "

Characters drink alcohol on a number of occasions

Positive Messages

The reality of suffering with Alzheimer's is portrayed with sensitivity and empathy, without patronizing or expressing pity. The movie encourages patience and understanding when dealing with someone with an illness such as Alzheimer's.

Positive Role Models

Anthony is shown to be smart, charming, and funny, but his illness often leads to fear, confusion, and anger. His confused emotions are made relatable by framing the scenes from his perspective. His daughter, Anne, is shown to be patient, loving, and supportive, though struggling with the pressure of caregiving.

Violence & Scariness

A character is slapped in the face a number of times, and another is strangled in a daydream sequence.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Occasional language includes "f--k," "s--t," and "bitch," as well as "t-ts" and "retarded."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Characters drink alcohol on a number of occasions but are never seen drunk. There is mention of prescribed medication and pills.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Father is an excellent -- but at times upsetting -- drama about a man suffering with Alzheimer's. Oscar winners Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman star as father and daughter, Anthony and Anne, with Anthony being diagnosed with the disease. Scenes are shown from his perspective and are purposefully disjointed and confusing to reflect his mental state. There are heartbreaking moments that are difficult to watch, including Anthony being slapped in the face, and him breaking down in a care home. Occasional strong language includes "f--k" and "s--t." Characters do drink alcohol but only in moderation. The movie is a clever and sensitive exploration into a cruel disease, but may be upsetting and confusing for younger viewers. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Based on 2 parent reviews

Love and Dementia

Think about it., what's the story.

In THE FATHER, Anthony ( Anthony Hopkins ) is introduced as a smart, charming older man living in a London flat, which his daughter Anne ( Olivia Colman ) visits regularly. But that version of reality is gradually challenged as it is revealed Anthony is suffering from Alzheimer's and his account of events is not always reliable. As the past, present, and elements of fantasy collide, Anthony struggles to make sense of his changing reality, which seems more and more at odds with his experience.

Is It Any Good?

Oscar-winner Hopkins gives one of the finest performances of his career as a man slowly losing his grip on reality and experiencing the full cycle of emotions that come with that. In some scenes in The Father , he's the vivid, charming, cultured man of a not-so-distant past. But in others, he's angry and defiant, then in a moment scared and childlike in his need to be soothed. Fellow Academy Award-winner Colman beautifully portrays the pain and frustration of managing the situation, in which help is constantly refused and her motives often questioned. She herself fluctuates between pandering, correcting, and losing control of her own anger.

The genius of the film really lies in its structure and casting. In his debut feature as director, Florian Zeller adapts his own stage play for the screen, making clever choices that leave the audience as disorientated as Anthony's character. One of those is having different actors play the same role, so that when Anthony doesn't recognize his daughter, the audience experiences the same dissociation. Even within the flat where Anthony lives, furniture subtly changes, timeframes shift, and apparent strangers appear as if from nowhere -- some of the most heartbreaking moments coming when he refuses to react for fear he can't possibly explain. It's an incredibly difficult watch at times, but Hopkins' performance makes the film such an intimate and compelling experience that it's hard to look away.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how Alzheimer's disease is portrayed in The Father . What are some of the techniques used to show how Anthony is experiencing events? How does the movie shed light on Alzheimer's? How does Anthony's diagnosis impact him and his family?

What do you think is the appeal of sad movies like this one? Why do we like to watch movies about tragedy and hardship? What can we take away from these emotional experiences?

Discuss the relationship between Anthony and Anne. Did it seem a loving one? How did Anne show empathy and compassion toward her father?

Talk about the language used in the movie. Did it seem necessary or excessive? What did it contribute to the movie?

Movie Details

In theaters : February 26, 2021
On DVD or streaming : March 25, 2021
Cast : Anthony Hopkins , Olivia Colman , Rufus Sewell
Director : Florian Zeller
Inclusion Information : Female actors
Studio : Sony Pictures Classics
Genre : Drama
Character Strengths : Compassion , Empathy
Run time : 97 minutes
MPAA rating : PG-13
MPAA explanation : some strong language, and thematic material
Awards : Academy Award , BAFTA - BAFTA Winner
Last updated : June 20, 2024

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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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‘A Sacrifice’ Review: Sadie Sink Joins the Cult Her Father Wants to Break Up in a Thriller with Better Questions Than Answers

Christian zilko.

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As a bestselling author, visiting professor, and expert in the field of social psychology, Ben knows a thing or two about how cults get started. But he’s not nearly as competent when it comes to the simpler — but not easier — task of keeping his family together. Years of disagreements about parenting ensured that his marriage ended in divorce, and he relocated to Europe with the hope that a little distance might help his broken family grow closer. It hasn’t exactly worked out that way, and by the time his teenage daughter Mazzy ( Sadie Sink ) shows up on his doorstep to spend a semester with him, she’s had plenty of time to reach the conclusion that her dad has completely and irreparably ruined her life.

The appeal of a group that makes little effort to hide its interest in suicide is a puzzling intellectual question — one that takes up so much of Ben’s time that he hardly notices that his daughter has started partying with a boy she met on the train. When Mazzy finally goes missing, Ben is forced to confront the possibility that his own focus on professional glory might have driven his daughter into the very group he was determined to stop.

Jordan Scott’s film , adapted from Nicholas Hogg’s novel “Tokyo Nobody” and produced by her father Ridley, isn’t quite as interesting as the towering questions that it asks. But the fact that it bothers to ask them at all puts the film in a rarified class above many of its Hollywood counterparts. At a certain point there’s only so much riffing you can do on the tension between secular humanism and our primordial thirst for the divine before you have to land the plane on a 94 minute father-daughter thriller. At least strong performances from Sink and Bana — along with sleek, noir-infused cinematography from Julie Kirkwood — make for a pleasant viewing experience even when the intellectualism comes up short.

A Vertical release, “A Sacrifice” opens in theaters on Friday, June 28.

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Dialogue can lie, but faces tell the truth. Stories are told through faces. It takes enormous trust on the part of a director to allow this to happen, to let the faces do most of the heavy lifting. "Daddio", written and directed by Christy Hall , is a film about faces, and this is pretty extraordinary considering it's a two-character film with wall-to-wall dialogue. Dakota Johnson's and Sean Penn's faces fill the screen, shot in extreme close-up--just the eyes sometimes, the smiles, the thoughts happening behind the eyes. Hall's dialogue compels you to listen, to lean in, but Johnson and Penn draw us into their separate worlds and histories, each face telling a million stories.

"Daddio" takes place entirely within the confines of a yellow cab making its way from JFK Airport back into Manhattan. The drive normally takes around 50 minutes without traffic. On this night, there's a car accident, causing a long delay. In today's world, this drive could occur entirely in silence, with the passenger on her phone the entire time. But in "Daddio," the two start talking. The driver, Clark (Penn), and his passenger, known only as Girlie (Johnson), have a lot of time to kill. The talk is, at first, the kind of chit-chat that goes on in a yellow cab. They talk about flat fees; they talk about cash vs. credit cards. But still, it's a connection. Small talk is pleasurable if you don't think of it as small.

Where this conversation ends up going is really something, and it's probably best that you don't know too much going in. There is a feeling that anything could happen. It's like the yellow cab is careening through an alternate universe where all the cards are on the table, and everything is up for grabs. Nobody's in a fixed state. There are actually openings for connections across all kinds of gaps - generation gap, the man-woman gap, a sensibility gap. The cab is a space of no judgment, even when things get intense or there's a disagreement. For whatever reason, these two have committed themselves to talking to one another until he gets her to her destination. Nobody opts out. A man keeps texting her asking her when she'll arrive. There's enough going on in her phone to keep her busy, and she could very easily tell Clark she doesn't feel like talking and never look up from her phone again. Throughout, there are moments where you can see Girlie get dragged into the digital world, away from Clark's analog world, sucked into the vortex of her relationship, one which doesn't bring a smile to her face. Something's obviously very wrong.

The chemistry between two actors is a mysterious thing. Johnson and Penn's chemistry is so compulsively watchable, which is fascinating because neither of them can move. For the most part, they are only looking at each other through the rear view mirror, but the back-and-forth is genuine.

Clark is a garrulous guy with opinions on everything. He is curious, not just about her but everything. "I'm just a guy who pays attention," he says. Nothing gets by him. Penn is so warm here. Warmth is not a word I associate with Penn, but what he brings out is so authentic it feels very close to the bone. But don't mistake Clark for a teddy bear. You get the sense he's not to be messed with. He can be crude; he says exactly what he thinks, and some of his views and language are outdated. But he is perceptive about people and not afraid to "go there." When he says to Girlie, grinning with appreciation, "You can handle yourself," you know what he means. She's strong; she looks him in the eye. She also seems lost and lonely. He likes her. Girlie, at first, might seem like she strolled out of a film noir, a sad-faced beautiful girl in the back of a cab, looking for a way out of the fix she's in. When the conversation turns provocative, as it does, it's subtle and starts with a comment from her. Blink and you'll miss it. You'd better believe Clark doesn't miss it. Both characters are tough customers but in different ways.

Hall shows real mastery in facing the challenges of filming her own material and filming an entire movie inside a car. There is precedent for this! (" Locke ", for one.) Phedon Papamichael's cinematography is beautiful and moody, with the lights of Manhattan blurred into abstraction out the windows, the shadows and lights brushing through the interior, the way Johnson's face is seen in the rearview against the back window, floating around in space (reminiscent of the gorgeous shots of Cybill Shepherd in the final scene of Taxi Driver). Hall makes intelligent use of angles: Penn's eyes are seen head-on or through the rearview, her reflection, his. The frame is never static. The film feels alive. Dickon Hinchliffe's melancholy score is a huge contribution, adding subtext and shadings from the moment she gets into the back seat of his cab. You know this isn't going to be just any ordinary ride.

It's a cliche, but talking with someone is like batting a beach ball back and forth: both parties must keep the ball in the air. If someone drops the ball, the other person has to pick it up and bat it back. Everyone knows what it feels like to toss the beach ball over, and the other person fails to bat it back. Or, worse, the person doesn't toss it your way in the first place.

Hall is a playwright and screenwriter who developed the 2020 television series "I Am Not Okay With This." "Daddio" is her feature film directorial debut. What an auspicious beginning.

Sheila O'Malley

Sheila O'Malley received a BFA in Theatre from the University of Rhode Island and a Master's in Acting from the Actors Studio MFA Program. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film Credits

Daddio (2024)

101 minutes

Dakota Johnson as Girlie

Sean Penn as Clark

Marcos A. Gonzalez as Taxi Attendant

Shannon Gannon as Driver (uncredited)

Christy Hall

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Review: In the underpowered ‘Daddio,’ the proverbial cab ride from hell could use more hell

A woman and a cabbie have a conversation.

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The art of conversation has been a casualty in these deeply divided days of ours, and the poor state of talk in the movies — so often expositional, glib or posturing — is an unfortunate reflection of that. The new film “Daddio” is an attempt to put verbal discourse front and center, confining to a yellow taxi a pair with different life paths, as you would expect when your leads are Sean Penn and Dakota Johnson. (Guess which one is the cabbie.)

Johnson’s coolly elegant, nameless traveler, a computer programmer returning to New York’s JFK airport from a trip visiting a big sister in Oklahoma, may be getting a flat rate for her journey, but the meter’s always running on the mouth of Penn’s gleefully crusty and opinionated driver, Clark. He’s a twice-married man prone to streetwise philosophizing about the state of the world and, over the course of the ride, the unsettled romances of his attractive fare. And as she drops clues about her life — sometimes unwittingly, then a little more freely — she gives back with some probing responses of her own, trying to pry him open.

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Writer-director Christy Hall, who originally conceived the scenario as a stage play, lets the chatter roll — there’s a significant stretch in which the cab isn’t even moving. And when silence sets in, there’s still an exchange to tend to, as Johnson occasionally, with apprehension, responds to a lover’s insistent sexting. This third figure (unseen, save one predictable picture sent to her phone) becomes another source of conjectural bravado for Clark, a self-proclaimed expert in male-female relations, who makes eye contact through the rearview mirror.

Watching the unremarkable “Daddio,” you’ll never worry that anything untoward or combustible will happen between the chauvinist driver with a heart of gold and the smart if vulnerable young female passenger who “can handle herself,” as Clark frequently observes. That lack of tension is the problem. The movie is less about a nuanced conversation between strangers than a writer’s careful construction, designed to bridge a cultural impasse between the sexes. Hall is so eager to stage a big moment that upends expectations and triggers wet-eyed epiphanies — He’s a compassionate blowhard! She can laugh at his crassness! — that we’re never allowed to feel the molecules shift from moment to moment in a way that isn’t unforced. Life may be the subject, but life is what’s missing.

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It doesn’t help that in directing her first feature, Hall has given herself one of the hardest jobs, getting the most out of only two ingredients and one container. It’s probably why Jim Jarmusch went the variety route with five different tales for his memorable 1991 taxi suite “Night on Earth.” That film conveyed a palpable sense of time and space.

“Daddio,” on the other hand, is nowhere near as assured visually or in its pacing. Hall has an experienced cinematographer in Phedon Papamichael (“Nebraska,” “Ford v Ferrari”) but chooses an unfortunate studio gloss that suggests utter control, rather than a what-might-happen vibe. Not that there’s anything wrong with a movie so clearly made on a set. But Johnson’s well-rehearsed poise and Penn’s coasting boldness make them seem like the stars of a commercial for a scent called Common Ground rather than flesh-and-blood people. At times, they hardly seem to be sharing the same car interior, leaving “Daddio” feeling like a safe space, when what it needs is danger.

'Daddio'

Rating: R, for language throughout, sexual material and brief graphic nudity Running time: 1 hour, 41 minutes Playing: In limited release Friday, June 28

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Movie Review: Taxicab confessions with Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn in ‘Daddio’

This image released by Sony Pictures Classics shows Dakota Johnson, left, and Sean Penn in a scene from “Daddio.” (Sony Pictures Classics via AP)

This image released by Sony Pictures Classics shows Dakota Johnson in a scene from “Daddio.” (Sony Pictures Classics via AP)

This image released by Sony Pictures Classics shows Sean Penn in a scene from “Daddio.” (Sony Pictures Classics via AP)

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It’s late at night when Dakota Johnson hops into a yellow taxicab at Kennedy airport in the new film “ Daddio .” She’s just going home to Manhattan, 44th Street, between 9th and 10th avenues. And her cab driver (Sean Penn) decides to strike up a conversation that will last the duration of this nearly 100-minute ride. There is no “quiet” setting cab.

This is not a horror movie, though for some a chatty driver on an unexpectedly long trip might be close. It’s not the beginning of a wild “Collateral”-style night either. No, these two people from different generations, different life experiences and different classes just talk about everything — life, mistakes, technology, human nature, what makes a New Yorker, absentee fathers, affairs, human nature and love.

Sean Penn in a scene from “Daddio.” (Sony Pictures Classics via AP)

“Daddio” was written and directed by Christy Hall, a playwright. Though we are also technically stuck in a cab with Girlie (Johnson) and Clark (Penn), Hall makes it feel rather cinematic, whether her camera is in close up on her actors, a rear-view mirror, a phone screen or letting us breathe for a moment with a shot outside of the cab, on the New York skyline. Claustrophobic it is not.

That’s not to say that some of the conversations won’t have you squirming in your skin a bit. The vast majority of those come from Clark, a Boomer with a heart of gold and some ideas about life that haven’t aged particularly well.

Taboo subjects and ideas that might get a person “cancelled” on social media are of course part of the point of this journey, in which two people who wouldn’t ever find themselves in an extended, soul-bearing conversation with each other under normal circumstances do.

Clark is one of those self-proclaimed truth-tellers who believes in his ability to read a person immediately, well-honed after 20 years of driving taxis in New York. He lures his passenger in with flattery about her New York savvy (giving cross streets instead of an address and not worrying about the meter) and shocks her when he’s able to immediately discern that the person she’s dating, and texting, is married. Her guard up a bit at the beginning with short, impersonal responses to Clark, who would ungenerously be described as a chronic mansplainer, but pretty soon they’re both in a therapy session (though mostly for her).

It’s an interesting and captivating pairing of actors, borne out of Johnson’s friendship with Penn (they’re neighbors in Malibu). He’s believable as this working class guy with no filter and she is as a woman with a lot on her mind. Movies like this and “AM I OK?,” are a nice reminder how Johnson thrives with material she connects with.

Dakota Johnson in a scene from “Daddio.” (Sony Pictures Classics via AP)

“Daddio,” in theaters Friday, is ultimately a fascinating and imperfect experiment in rich lineage of modest two-handers that take on an epic scope. There are dull moments and off-putting tangents that seem to exist only to provoke, but the message at its core is a nice one about connection and empathy and occasionally uncomfortable intergenerational conversations that don’t end with someone being silenced. It might just have you thinking about starting a random chat with a stranger, too.

“Daddio,” a Sony Pictures Classics release in theaters Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “language throughout, sexual material and brief graphic nudity.” Running time: 101 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.

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‘Daddio’ Review: Two for the Road

Sean Penn and Dakota Johnson outclass a humdrum script as two people who talk — and talk — in a New York City taxicab.

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A woman with bleach-blonde hair sits smiling in the back of a taxicab.

By Jeannette Catsoulis

Handicapped by more than a terrible title, Christy Hall’s “Daddio,” set almost entirely inside a New York City taxicab, tries too hard and lasts too long. A synthetic encounter between a gabby cabby and his self-possessed female passenger, the movie is a claustrophobic two-hander oxygenated in part by Phedon Papamichael’s sleekly gorgeous cinematography.

The star power of its leads, Sean Penn and Dakota Johnson, doesn’t hurt either. Injecting nuance and emotional depth into Hall’s uninspired script, the two turn a threatened slog into a mildly enjoyable journey. Penn plays Clark, a tough, salt-of-the-earth type (he actually talks about salt at one point) whose roughened hands and veined forearms are catnip to the camera. Johnson is his last fare of the night, a sophisticated young woman traveling from Kennedy Airport to midtown Manhattan. He calls her Girlie.

He is very nosy. When not railing against credit cards and rideshare apps, he peppers his passenger with increasingly personal questions. Initially guarded, Girlie slowly warms to this drive-by philosopher. Through the barriers of age, gender, class and education, their revelations grow more intimate — sometimes implausibly so, as when Clark shares a distasteful anecdote about his first wife, along with his thoughts on what married men want in a mistress. (Hint: It’s not love.) Not that Girlie is clutching her pearls; rather, she’s surreptitiously sexting her tongue-lolling lover.

Somehow, Penn never allows Clark’s inappropriateness to become predatory, and Johnson’s marvelously expressive features reveal details the dialogue declines to provide. Yet if there’s a finer point to any of this — beyond yes, talking to strangers is sometimes beneficial — it eluded me. I did, though, appreciate Hall’s choice to flash some texts directly onto the movie screen: Squinting at characters’ smartphones is one of my least favorite activities. Along with listening to gossipy cabdrivers.

Daddio Rated R for bared breasts and barroom language. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters.

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COMMENTS

The Father movie review & film summary (2021)
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 ...
The Father
Anthony (Academy Award Winner, Anthony Hopkins) is 80, mischievous, living defiantly alone and rejecting the carers that his daughter, Anne (Academy Award and Golden Globe Winner, Olivia Colman ...
'The Father' review: Anthony Hopkins at his devastating best
Review: 'The Father' showcases Anthony Hopkins at his devastating best. Olivia Colman and Anthony Hopkins in the movie 'The Father.". The Times is committed to reviewing theatrical film ...
'The Father' Review: A Capricious Mind
NYT Critic's Pick. Directed by Florian Zeller. Drama. PG-13. 1h 37m. Find Tickets. When you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission ...
'The Father': Film Review
Courtesy of Sundance. 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 ...
'The Father' Review: Anthony Hopkins Gives a Tour-de ...
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. There have been some good dramas about people ...
The Father (2020)
R4J4P 17 September 2020. This is a film that stays with you. Of course there's the brilliant performances but there's more. While other films have taken on old age and dementia, those films took on coping with a significant other's condition. The difference here is that the film is from the sufferer's perspective.
Movie Review: 'The Father' : NPR
Movie Review: 'The Father' 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
Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 9, 2022. Keith Garlington Keith & the Movies. "The Father" is a tough watch. But the bold choices, the emotional honesty, the crisp detailed ...
The Father Review
The Father is a devastating masterwork by first-time director Florian Zeller, based on his play Le Père. The film follows an old man with dementia (Anthony Hopkins) and manipulates its editing ...
The Father (2020)
The Father: Directed by Florian Zeller. 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 shines in haunting dementia drama
Sneakily utilizing production design and uncanny good editing, "The Father" fascinatingly puts the viewer in the same state of distress as its main character. And in adapting his own play, the ...
'The Father' Review: Anthony Hopkins Gives One Of His Greatest ...
The Father truly is one of the greatest films of 2020, a timely and timeless tale that is deserving of far more attention than it's likely to get during these complicated times. /Film Rating: 9.5 ...
The Father Review
The Father Review. Octogenarian Anthony (Anthony Hopkins) spends his life pottering around a plush London flat. But despite all the amenities, his existence is hellish, thanks to the dementia ...
'The Father' Review: Anthony Hopkins' Mind Is Playing Tricks On Him
The Father is thus both a psychological detective story and a stealth haunted-house movie. It's an exceedingly clever and polished piece of filmmaking, and it marks an impressive feature debut for ...
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The Father Review: Anthony Hopkins Leads a Harrowing Drama ...
"The Father" is a slippery film in which even the most basic information can be vaporized in the span of a single cut, but there's no ambiguity to the fact that Anthony Hopkins plays the ...
The Father, review: Anthony Hopkins delivers shockingly naked acting in
Dir: Florian Zeller; Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Olivia Colman, Olivia Williams, Rufus Sewell, Imogen Poots, Mark Gatiss, Ayesha Dharker. Cert 12A, 97 mins. Florian Zeller's The Father originated as ...
The Father review: Anthony Hopkins' dementia drama is a quiet revelation
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 ...
The Father review: a journey into the eye of the dementia storm
The Father film review: a portrait of dementia that pulls you into the eye of the storm. The debut film from playwright Florian Zeller is a brilliant portrayal of not just a man but also the ...
'The Father' Movie Review: Starring Anthony Hopkins
SEAN GLEASON/Sony Pictures Classics. The Father, adapted from director Florian Zeller's award-winning 2012 play, gives Anthony Hopkins a role designed to nearly break your heart: a role full of ...
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What you will—and won't—find in this movie. Character remarks on another being "gorgeous." Parents need to know that The Father is an excellent -- but at times upsetting -- drama about a man suffering with Alzheimer's. Oscar winners Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman star as father and daughter, Anthony and Anne, with Anthony being diagnosed ...
The Father Is a Devastating Close-up on Dementia: Review
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 ...
'A Sacrifice' Review: Sadie Sink Joins the Cult Her Father Wants to
Jordan Scott's film, adapted from Nicholas Hogg's novel "Tokyo Nobody" and produced by her father Ridley, isn't quite as interesting as the towering questions that it asks. But the fact ...
The Monkey (2025)
The Monkey: Directed by Oz Perkins. With Theo James, Christian Convery, Tatiana Maslany, Elijah Wood. When twin brothers Bill and Hal find their father's old monkey toy in the attic, a series of gruesome deaths start. The siblings decide to throw the toy away and move on with their lives, growing apart over the years.
Daddio movie review & film summary (2024)
"Daddio" takes place entirely within the confines of a yellow cab making its way from JFK Airport back into Manhattan. The drive normally takes around 50 minutes without traffic.
'Daddio' review: Cab ride from hell could use more hell
Review: 'tiny father,' a new play about unexpected parenthood, is disappointingly minor key June 24, 2024 Opinion: Father's Day invites lots of gender stereotypes.
Movie Review: Taxicab confessions with Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn in
"Daddio" was written and directed by Christy Hall, a playwright. Though we are also technically stuck in a cab with Girlie (Johnson) and Clark (Penn), Hall makes it feel rather cinematic, whether her camera is in close up on her actors, a rear-view mirror, a phone screen or letting us breathe for a moment with a shot outside of the cab, on the New York skyline.
'Daddio' Review: Sean Penn and Dakota Johnson Outclass a Humdrum Script
A synthetic encounter between a gabby cabby and his self-possessed female passenger, the movie is a claustrophobic two-hander oxygenated in part by Phedon Papamichael's sleekly gorgeous ...

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

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