Having just scared off his recent caregiver, Anthony, an ailing, octogenarian Londoner gradually succumbing to dementia, feels abandoned when concerned Anne, his daughter, tells him she's moving to Paris. Confused and upset, against the backdrop of a warped perspective and his rapid, heart-rending mental decline, Anthony is starting to lose his grip on reality, struggling to navigate the opaque landscape of present and past. Now, as faded memories and glimpses of lucidity tri... (Full plot summary below)
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Having just scared off his recent caregiver, Anthony, an ailing, octogenarian Londoner gradually succumbing to dementia, feels abandoned when concerned Anne, his daughter, tells him she's moving to Paris. Confused and upset, against the backdrop of a warped perspective and his rapid, heart-rending mental decline, Anthony is starting to lose his grip on reality, struggling to navigate the opaque landscape of present and past. Now, as faded memories and glimpses of lucidity trigger sudden mood swings, dear ones, Anthony's surroundings, and even time itself become distorted. Why has his younger daughter stopped visiting? Who are the strangers that burst in on Anthony?
Leave your thoughts about The Father.
| The Hollywood ReporterTodd McCarthyThe 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. |
| Original-CinThom ErnstThe Father is a compelling, illusionary story about aging's disorienting symptoms. It is a masterpiece of structure, narrative, editing, and performance. |
| CineVueChristopher MachellIn his astonishingly assured debut feature, French playwright-turned-director Florian Zeller handles the mental decline of an elderly man with sensitivity and insight. |
| IGNSiddhant AdlakhaThe Father is a devastating masterwork by first-time director Florian Zeller. |
| EmpireNick de SemlyenHopkins is extraordinary as a man flailing against a condition that’s taking everything from him. And Zeller proves he’s a natural filmmaker, orchestrating a Wagnerian opera of emotion based entirely around an old man in a flat. |
| The GuardianPeter BradshawIts 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. |
| SlashfilmJason GorberThis 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. |
| Boston GlobeTy BurrAs Anthony, a blustery London widower whose grip on reality slowly comes unglued over the course of the film, Hopkins does it again. This is a magnificent and harrowing performance: A lion in winter slowly coming to ground. |
| The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Kate TaylorYes, The Father is a familiar story and a universal one. Yet Zeller has been uniquely inventive in the way he evokes the unreliability of memory and the subjectivity of experience in the senile – and the healthy. |
| ObserverRex ReedAnother powerful, mesmerizing and downright heartbreaking performance by the great Anthony Hopkins enhances The Father. |
