The Father

The film seamlessly blends genuine fear with overwhelming sadness.

[Anthony Hopkins] is absolutely remarkable here. I read the screenplay, available online, out of curiosity, and what he brings to the words on the page is beyond and beyond and beyond. Hopkins has played King Lear (twice) but this is his real King Lear.

The way Zeller and his production designer Peter Francis orchestrate these changes are almost imperceptible, but nevertheless disorienting and utterly crucial to the narrative.

Without resorting to exploitative, amped-up mystery or obfuscation, Zeller and co-writer Christopher Hampton have fashioned a sort of gaslight thriller in which the mind is both predator and prey.

The Father distorts and disorients in keeping with its protagonist's increasingly confused view of the world.

It's a film that disquiets on a cellular level.

As much of a disquieting horror film as it is a deeply-felt drama, The Father finds an inherent, disturbingly cinematic vehicle out of its protagonist’s psychological instability — yet never at the cost of Anthony’s dignity or sense of identity.

The film ends on a note of human vulnerability I’ve simply never seen from Hopkins before and it absolutely destroyed me.

It is a very physical performance: unflinching, dazzling and one so mesmerisingly upsetting that I never want to watch it again.

A psychological drama that has the originality of narrating the action from the point of view of an older man, through which the viewer must discover if he suffers from some type of senile dementia, or if it is his environment who wants harm him.