MOVIES
PAGE 18 • GO! MAGAZINE
Thursday, april 22, 2021 • ThE BullETiN
‘The Father’ tells a gripping tale of aging
BY MAKENZIE WHITTLE • The Bulletin
“T
he Father” is
one of those
beautiful films
that captures the heartbreaking
reality of a situation so well that
you will probably never want to
watch it again. Based on director
Florian Zeller’s stage play “La
Père” and adapted by Zeller
and Christopher Hampton,
the film follows a man in
his late 80s named Anthony
(Anthony Hopkins) as his mind
Sony Pictures Classics
deteriorates from dementia.
Olivia Coleman and Anthony Hopkins in a scene from “The Father” (2020).
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We see the world through Anthony’s eyes,
the heartbreaking confusion associated with
the disease, we see his daughter, Anne, ap-
pear as Olivia Coleman then as Olivia Wil-
liams and back again, we see scenes take
place out of order so the viewer is fully im-
mersed in the way his mind is working.
The film starts with a visit from his
daughter who brings him his groceries and
checks in on him after he has berated his
home care worker and accused her of steal-
ing his watch. She then happily tells him of
her plans to move to Paris with a French-
man she met.
Then Anne is suddenly gone, and we see
Paul (Mark Gatiss), Anne’s husband, whom
Anthony doesn’t recognize, and we are met
with the idea that this may not be Antho-
ny’s flat.
It’s not until about 20 minutes in that we
see some semblance of linear storytelling
when we focus on Anne for a moment.
Anthony awakens one morning to find
the flat’s layout has changed around him.
Anne interviews another caregiver, Laura
(Imogen Poots), whom her father charms
with dripping charisma before changing on
a dime to a more cruel and petty demeanor,
leaving Anne in tears.
We then shift back into Anthony’s per-
spective as he relives previous scenes, this
time with the real Anne and Paul. We see
jumps in time and place, and we are con-
stantly pulled alongside him as pieces of his
More Information
“The Father”
97 minutes
Rated PG-13 for some strong language and
thematic material.
Hopkins delivers a career best in a
lifetime of remarkable roles, and
Coleman wears every emotion — grief,
annoyance, exhaustion, guilt and overall
sadness — on her face, often all at the
same time. You recognize everything
immediately.
mind are slowly lost to the disease.
If you have had any kind of connection to
watching loved one slowly lose themselves
to dementia, it is hard to watch it unfold on
screen in any capacity. What “The Father”
does, and does extremely well, is tell its story
through the mind of the person losing it. Ed-
iting scenes together in such a way to create a
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