- Title: The Father
- IMDb: link
The Father offers a view at the world through the eyes of an 83 year-old man (Anthony Hopkins) fighting Alzheimer’s and dementia. Events and characters are jumbled due to Anthony’s (Hopkins) confusion about where he is living, and even the identity of the the people around him who are only sometimes recognizable. Events are often incomplete and shown out of order, to allow the audience to stumble through Anthony’s reality with him before enough is finally revealed to piece together more of his reality than he seems capable of fully understanding.
Olivia Colman, Olivia Williams, Mark Gatiss, Rufus Sewell, and Imogen Poots all come and go throughout the film as Anthony struggles to remember who each is as his frustration leads to anger and resentment. Hopkins is the glue which holds the film together, but each actor adds another level to the Anthony’s distorted world. Director Florian Zeller adapts his own award-winning play Le Père for the screen offering a heartbreaking account of one slowly loosing their grip on reality that is often soul crushing in its honest and bleak examination of dementia and how it affects an individual as well as those around him.
