The Father

The Father places the viewer inside the experience of Anthony, an elderly man whose dementia is unravelling his sense of what is real. Rooms change, timelines fold back on themselves, and the people around him, above all his daughter Anne, are played by different faces or say things that contradict what came before. The film's structure enacts his confusion rather than describing it from outside.

By filming dementia from within the collapsing reality of the sufferer, it dissolves time, identity, and even the recognition of a beloved face. It is an unusually direct account of what is lost and of the anguish on both sides of care. Anthony Hopkins won Best Actor and the film won Best Adapted Screenplay at the 2021 Academy Awards; it is based on Florian Zeller's play Le Pere.