The Father

In response to the question “are you afraid of death?”, someone once told me “no, I'm afraid of dying”. This film reminded me of that. Brilliantly written and with a fantastic performance by Hopkins, The Father is a mosaic of the decay of human memory and the loss of awareness of place, time and self. Set in a few rooms with a handful of actors, this is distressing and sad film, as if it had been written by a man who went through it himself and came back. Why watch such a film? To remind ourselves of how good we have it. (03/12/2022)

The exact opposite of what I expected from a screening of "an Oscar-winning film about a man with dementia". No obligatory ticking off of touching or disturbing points of the classic storyline, but rather an unpleasant, visually very modest, yet suffocatingly tight one-man show by Anthony Hopkins, without exaggeration the best performance of his career. The precisely cast supporting roles do not diminish his dominance; on the contrary, they help him shine even brighter. I can't give the highest rating purely for subjective reasons, because when I imagine that this awaits me with my own parent at some point, I have a little trouble even taking a breath. (04/12/2021)

An incredibly fresh cinematic probe into the issue of old age and the slow decline of both the physical and primarily the psychological that is uniquely turned around and dissected in detail from the perspective of the patient, not the people around them, so we don’t get any corny tearful scenes or any other similar mining of emotions. Zeller goes about it in a sophisticated, at times almost detective-like manner, and the phenomenal performance of Anthony Hopkins doesn't give the viewer a chance to breathe. Within the genre, an unusual atypical film that is worth seeing, although it is not an easy watch. (04/25/2021)

Anthony Hopkins is definitely not an old hand yet, as he convinced me with his breathtaking performance in The Father. The film manages to evoke the mental state of a man who is slowly but surely being consumed by a serious illness, robbing him of his memories and overall awareness of himself. At first I found myself actually similarly confused as Anthony, then I found myself sympathizing with both him and the people around him – especially his daughter Anne. It was incredibly sad to see what Alzheimer's disease, which befalls many of us when we live to such an old age, can do to a person. The Father is mainly an acting tour-de-force by Hopkins, but the supporting cast also gave supremely convincing performances, giving rise to an intimate but all the more powerful slice-of-life film. Old age can be peaceful, but it can also be cruel! (04/13/2021)

The unbearable lightness of acting. I remember well Hopkins's exclusive interview with Reflex, where he said that "...acting is the easiest profession in the world...". So Sir Anthony cut yet another theatrical role, the likes of which he has portrayed hundreds of in his lifetime on stages, and he still won an Oscar for it, by the way. Yeah, acting is a beautiful profession, if you know how to do it. (05/07/2021)