Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Father’ on VOD, Anthony Hopkins’ Unforgettable Portrayal of a Man With Debilitating Memory Loss

After a short theatrical stint and a half-dozen Oscar nominations, we can now watch The Father at home, via VOD services. The film, about an elderly man fighting memory loss, has plenty of past awards-season cred in stars Anthony Hopkins, now a six-time Oscar nominee (and winner for The Silence of the Lambs), and Olivia Colman, who adds a second nom after winning in 2019 for The Favourite. It’s based on a play by Florian Zeller, who also directs — and yes, of course the original French production enjoyed significant accolades as well, winning the Moliere Award in 2014. (Also notable, Frank Langella won a Tony in 2016 for the play’s Broadway run.) All this means the film has the potential to be pretty damn watchable, right? Probably.

THE FATHER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Anthony (Hopkins) has just browbeaten another nurse into quitting, and his daughter, Anne (Colman), isn’t happy about it. He called the poor nurse a “little bitch” and “threatened her physically.” But she stole his watch, he insists, although Anne quickly finds it in his hiding place. How does she know about that hiding place? She just knows. She sits him down, tells him she’s moving away. To Paris. What for? They don’t even speak English there, he says incredulously. She met a man and is in love, she says. She’ll come back to London to visit on weekends, she promises. “You’re abandoning me,” Anthony says. He seems angry, upset, sad, confused. “What’s going to become of me?”

Later. Anthony makes himself a cup of tea in the kitchen. He hears a noise in another room of the flat. It’s a man. Anthony doesn’t recognize him. But it’s Paul (Mark Gatiss), you know, Anne’s husband, he lives here. But she’s moving to Paris because she met a man, Anthony says. He hates to break it to him. Women always end up leaving, he says. Paul calls Anne. Your dad isn’t feeling well, he says. She’s just down at the grocery. A few moments pass and she comes home with chicken for dinner, but she’s not Anne. She’s played by Olivia Williams.

Fade in on the same kitchen, but it looks different. Newer. The battered cupboards and countertops replaced with contemporary ones. The Anne played by the first Olivia, Olivia Colman, is here. She tells her father a potential new nurse is coming by, and he needs to behave himself. Laura (Imogen Poots) rings the bell. He charms Laura as Anne playfully rolls her eyes. He tells Laura he’s a tap dancer, and she laughs and laughs and then he says she resembles his other daughter Lucy, who laughed and laughed — inanely, he says with casual cruelty, and add that she was always his favorite while Anne is sitting right there, and she catches Laura’s eye as if to say, “This is what it’s like,” and later she fantasizes about choking the old man in his sleep.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Add The Father to the list of profoundly moving films about dementia/Alzheimer’s: Away from Her, Amour and Still Alice. (It also indirectly recalls the way Christopher Nolan toys with time in a profound manner in his films, most notably Dunkirk.)

Performance Worth Watching: Hopkins’. You’ve rarely seen such a prickly, complex and heartbreaking performance.

Memorable Dialogue: Anthony’s sad, poetic lament: “I feel as if I’m losing all my leaves. The branches and the wind and the rain.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Anthony loves listening to classical music in the den with headphones, and in one of the film’s quiet scenes, the CD skip-skip-skip-skip-skips. This is his existence. Something in his memory has been deeply scratched, affecting playback. Zeller sticks with Anthony’s point-of-view throughout The Father, effectively putting us in the mind of a man who’s losing his ability to comprehend reality, to recognize his daughter from other characters in his life, to understand why the flat’s front door is the same door leading out of the doctor’s office. Everything is jumbled, out of sequence, the faces rearranged, moments repeated, narrative blank spots unacknowledged.

It upsets me to say it, but this must be like hell. You want it to end. I’m not sure a more empathetic portrayal of late-life memory loss has been made — or possibly even greater than that, a more empathetic portrayal of another person’s deep suffering.

The Father is an exquisite balance of the intellectual and the emotional. Zeller’s inventive structure is a shrewd calculation, a fresh angle on a familiar story. (Does it feel “stagey,” like other play-to-film adaptations? Somewhat, but not nearly as much as others.) But it also lands heavy blows to the solar plexus, leaving us winded, sometimes gasping. It’s not just a manipulative tearjerker, but something far deeper than that — a philosophical exercise maybe, on just how tragic, how impossible the situation is for all parties.

Take Anne’s position: What are her options? Should she put her entire life on hold while her father slowly, slowly deteriorates? How does she deal with the unpredictable churn of his memories, which flow unfiltered from his broken consciousness? What’s the breaking point, where his care should be handed over to professionals? Can she trust someone else to care for him? End-of-life stories like this emphasize our limited time on Earth, but how should she weigh and use her own? What is life for her, truly? Is it weathering the pain of her father’s situation? Is it appreciating the joy she’ll experience in Paris? If she hands off some of the responsibility, can she weather the inevitable guilt? What is kindness here, what is mercy, what is self-preservation?

There are no easy answers.

Colman is extraordinary of course, with love, grief, remorse and veracity in her performance. The film may be Hopkins’ most powerful and affecting work, and any doubts about his ability to establish dramatic command presence will be disintegrated (two of the last three films I saw him in were Thor: Ragnarok and Transformers: The Last Knight; the other was The Two Popes). I can’t speak to the film’s authenticity, but it’s utterly, profoundly convincing, a powerhouse drama distilled to great purity. To say the film is heartbreaking feels like understatement; I felt outright skewered by it.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Father isn’t an easy watch — it’s about as weighty as a movie gets. It may cast a depressive pall upon you, but as films that explore the bleaker elements of life tend to do, it may also prompt you to appreciate what you have while you have it.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Where to stream The Father