The Father Review: Trailblasing the pathways of a deteriorating mind

A still from The Father

The Father
PG-13; Drama, Thriller
Director: Florian Zeller
Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Olivia Colman, Ayesha Dharker
Rating: ''''

French playwright turned director, Florian Zeller's The Father, adapted from his own play and co-written with Christopher Hampton, is a film that highlights the cognitive and functional issues dementia patients face. Beautifully elucidated through the deteriorating mental state of its principal character, The Father aka Anthony (Anthony Hopkins). The film puts its audience through a series of experiences that opens the layman's eye to the reality of mental illness, the innate existential struggles of the patient and the trauma of the principal caregiver who in this case happens to be his daughter Anne (Olivia Colman).

Unlike Still Alice and The Savages, films which showed us the third-person pov of dementia, this film places us squarely in the mind of the patient. What we see on screen is the confusion, fear, trauma, and steady decapitation of a fast deteriorating mind. The opening scene has the caring daughter Anne rushing to her father's flat in order to aprise him of a change in her circumstance. Purportedly, because of her impending shift to Paris, Anthony will have to acquiesce to a professional caregiver. But the fiercely independent Anthony refuses all help and then begins to literally fall apart. As he tries to make sense of his changing circumstances, he begins to doubt, become suspicious, and gets enraged with his loved ones and his own perception of reality. The haunting emotional free fall evidenced by Anthony's jarring, disturbing mental decline has the power to jerk you out of your inviolability.

The dialogues capture the bewilderment and torment of a mind slowly being erased. We experience meteoric shifts in Anthony's time frame. Items relocated, lost, found, forgotten, misplaced; settings shifted; scenes interchanged with a revolving set of characters. Zeller's perceptive, sensitised touches give rich vein to a frame of reference barely experienced before. Peter Francis' classy production design, Ludovico Einaudi's masterfully evocative classical music score, Yorgos Lamprinos fluidly shifting editing and Ben Smithard's emblematic use of lights and shadows lend breathtaking vivacity to a harrowing experience. Above all, it's the brilliant ensemble (which also includes Ayesha Dharker as a psychiatrist's assistant) and mesmerising leads who make this an unforgettable journey. Hopkins' absolutely heart-wrenching turn as a man unable to come to terms with his deteriorating mental condition and Olivia Colman's incandescent epitomising of a sorrowful daughter having to make a devastating decision regarding her beloved father, are the kind of performances that are sure to gather accolades aplenty.