Anthony Hopkins’s portrayal of dementia will undo you: The Father reviewed

The Father is an immensely powerful film about dementia starring Sir Anthony Hopkins, who was asleep in his bed in Wales when his Best Actor Oscar was announced, so we’ll never know if his outfit would have been a hit or a miss. Shall we give him the benefit of the doubt and say ‘hit’? Either way, he 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.

Adapting it from his own play (with help from Christopher Hampton), Florian Zeller has also directed the film. Zeller wrote the part specifically for Hopkins, hence our main character is called Anthony. This Anthony lives in a magnificent flat in an expensive part of London and the action rarely strays. But, miraculously, it never feels stagey as so many plays that become films do. Anthony is visited daily by his daughter Anne (Olivia Colman). She is at her wits’ end as he called his last carer a ‘little bitch’ and now she has quit. She stole his watch, he protests. Anne retrieves his watch from his hiding place under the bath. Well, he says, she would have stolen it, had she known where it was. My own father suffered from paranoid delusion at the end. I was shredding his paperwork, I was burning his suits, I had stolen his wallet. I swear to you, I was doing none of these things. I was often impatient and now I wish I’d watched this film, which makes you see how terrifying it must be to think you’ve lost your watch (or wallet) while knowing, at some level, that what you are losing is your own self.