The Father review: A deeply moving and deceptively simple depiction of dementia

Dir: Florian Zeller. Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Olivia Colman, Mark Gatiss, Imogen Poots, Rufus Sewell, Olivia Williams. Cert 12A, 96 mins

Oscar controversies always feel a little grotesque for the ways they flatten and minimise the work involved. Anthony Hopkins’s performance in The Father, Florian Zeller’s haunting dementia drama, feels delicate and crushingly familiar. And yet, it’s been too easily reduced to a mere pawn in the backlash against this year’s Academy Awards, where producers made the baffling decision to end the night on Best Actor – in the hope that they could close on a tribute to Hopkins’s fellow nominee, the late Chadwick Boseman. But it was Hopkins who won. He was a no-show, for reasons of being 83 years old and in Wales. The ceremony seemed to end on a hurried shrug and an “oops”.

It was a cruel thing for Boseman’s family to be put through. And it was unfair, too, to both Hopkins and The Father – neither deserves to be reduced to a headline or a future piece of Oscars trivia. Zeller’s lovingly put-together film sees Hopkins in the role of Anthony, a man with advancing dementia living in the care of his daughter Anne (Olivia Colman). She can’t bear the idea of putting him in a care facility but finds herself unable to cope with his increasing needs.

But Zeller never allows his audience to see the objective truth of the situation. We are fully, and forcefully, placed inside Anthony’s head. The layout of his apartment changes in between scenes, without reason or explanation. Anne gently warns that she’s moving to Paris soon, leaving her father in the trained care of Laura (Imogen Poots). Some time later, she laughs at the idea – as if it were the most absurd thing she’s ever heard. At times, she appears in the form of an entirely different woman (Olivia Williams); her partner also shifts identities, played either by Rufus Sewell or Mark Gatiss.

Zeller, who adapted his own stage play with the help of screenwriter Christopher Hampton, has found a deceptively simple way to express the claustrophobic terror of losing hold of one’s memories. It’s devastating not only for those whose lives have been touched by dementia, but for anyone who’s lived in quiet fear it may be looming around the corner. There is a panic that awakens in Colman’s eyes, papered over by thin smiles and small talk, that cuts like a knife.

But it’s Hopkins’s Anthony, in the end, who sits at the very centre of The Father, as all manner of anxieties, fears, and frustrations orbit around him. There’s something very thoughtful and deliberate about the actor’s approach to the character. Anthony is playful, a natural showman – someone who’s certainly been called an eccentric many times in his life, and who may have seen some of the early warning signs of his affliction brushed off as mere quirks.

Increasingly, he finds that all the armour of knowledge and experience, built up over a lifetime, has slipped away. That sudden vulnerability makes him regress to an almost childlike state. Hopkins connects us to these emotions through the smallest of details – a sudden flinch, his arms recoiling up into himself, or two eyes darting mischievously around the room. It’s deeply moving, important work, whether or not it was ever destined to win awards.