Yasmin Kleinbart is a 20 something hiding in Orange County, California. She loves to watch movies with a craft beer in one hand and pad thai in the other.When she's not writing about entertainment, she's participating in nerd trivia at the bar or trying to beat the Water Temple in The Legend of Zelda.
Olivia Colman and Anthony Hopkins in The Father (2020) | Sony Pictures Classics
Don’t you remember? This innocuous question, a conversational bridge and a filler in daily speech, becomes a cross that Anthony is increasingly unable to bear. An octogenarian from London, Anthony has begun an inexorable slide into dementia. Time has lost meaning for him, even though he tries to keep up by constantly peering at his watch – if only he could find it.
The characteristics of this debilitating form of mental atrophy are brilliantly imagined for the screen in Florian Zeller’s Oscar-nominated
The Father – the crippling loss of memory and inability to distinguish morning from evening, the hallucinations and the paranoia, the repetitive behaviour, the terror over the gradual loss of identity. The French playwright and first-time director has based
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Dementia has become an increasingly popular topic to tackle in film, particularly in 2020. At least six films last year featured the subject across multiple genres ranging from horror to documentaries. While all the films had their merits, Florian Zeller’s
The Father felt the most genuine. Adapted from his stage play of the same name, Zeller makes his feature film debut with a beautifully tragic character study about a man slowly losing his grip on reality.
Instead of focusing solely on an outsider perspective,
The Father provides an empathetic and immersive experience of the everyday life of someone with dementia.