Film review: The Father

Anthony Hopkins won his second Best Actor Oscar - his first was for The Silence of The Lambs in 1992 - for his role as a man gradually succumbing to dementia in Florian Zeller’s heartbreaking debut The Father. Adapted from Zeller’s own award-winning French language play Le pére, the film also stars Olivia Coleman, Rufus Sewell and Mark Gatiss.

Hopkins is Anthony, a man in his eighties struggling to come to terms with life after he is informed by his daughter Anne (Coleman) that she has met someone and is planning to move to Paris. As he tries to make sense of his changing circumstances, Anthony starts to doubt his loved ones, his own mind and even reality. This soon leads to some rather confusing and churlish exchanges with people around him.

Zeller’s film plays with its audience's own perception of what is real and imagined. it tells the story, rather cleverly, from the perspective of the mind of a man unable to discern between reality and delusion. The Father could well be the first film to truly convey what it must feel like to be falling into the grips of dementia and is as heartbreaking as it is brilliantly innovative in a narrative sense.

What makes the film even more compelling, is its ability to trust its audience to put all the pieces of this brilliantly written puzzle together. Zeller has given us a dense and brilliantly complex story in which things that we thought to be real often turn out to be delusions and vice versa.