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.

The Father is a film that punches you straight in the gut. You’ll never be able to forget this one.

Anthony Hopkins’ Oscar-winning act leaves you with a heavy heart.

The great Anthony Hopkins plays Anthony, an eighty-something-year-old man who’s constantly at war with his own cognition.

Through our protagonist’s mental condition, we witness how human consciousness turns against us. That an ill mind can make a cruel and grotesque joke about our very existence, setting up a punch line that will tear down the world we thought we lived in.