Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		4.0

The Father Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Martin Liebman May 17, 2021

The Father would seem to be the antithesis of the classic Hollywood film and story, and it may be a sign of the shifting dynamics and audience acceptance of a film that falls into no traditional category. The central conflict is more inward than it is outward. The villain is the invisible passage of time and the increasingly evident, yet silent, internal break that is the result. It's an intimate drama about a crumbling mind, its star an aged man who is barely holding on to his faculties and all but incapable of living a life of sense of and structure. The film atypically explores his struggles through his own broken perspective. It's a jumbled mess of connected, yet still disparate, observations of and maneuverings in his small part of the world. Yet for as structurally scrambled as it may be, Director Florian Zeller, working off of his own stage production titled Le Père, builds a picture of resplendent elegance, speaking boldly and clearly on the very real struggles of mental deterioration, its impact on the one suffering from the break, and how those who are torn between the increasing challenges of caretaking and the need to push forward with their own lives are impacted by the increasingly sober and hopeless works necessary to sustain the man.

Anthony (Anthony Hopkins) is a man of advanced age whose mental clarity is quickly declining. He's regularly surprised by who and what is in his flat and unable to remember small details, such as where he placed his watch. The one constant in his life is his daughter Anne (Olivia Colman) who is also his caretaker yet in most every way the source of Anthony's unwitting frustration, whether it's her pushing a new caretaker, Laura (Imogen Poots), on him; declaring her intention to move to Paris; or the increasingly intrusive status of her relationship with Paul (Rufus Sewell). In the moment, Anthony appears well capable and mentally sound, but it becomes increasingly clear that his mind cannot keep up with the truths as they define, and continuously redefine, the world around him.

The Father is a devastatingly horrific portrait of a man succumbing to the dispositions of old age and the increasing absence of a tangible relationship to the world around him. It is also a curiously heartfelt film, one of great beauty as it gazes into the human condition from several essential perspectives, including the bond between parent and child and the mind's desire to grab onto the peace and processes it knows in an effort to amplify the good and shroud the bad in what may be described as the losing battle to hang onto reality, to combat the moments of surprise and uncertainty that have broadly overtaken its ability to process and discern. It's a film of remarkable vision, particularly as its vision challenges the audience to enter, but never understand, a world of ever shifting dynamics and perspective and characters. It's a film of vast uncertainty beyond the certainty of the title character's mental decline. Never has a film so firmly pulled its audience so fully and vividly into the world of a character who is not even on the cusp of dementia but who is experiencing it full-on.

That keen yet sobering perspective is the film's draw, more so even than its sublime performances and superior production design. Zeller, whose familiarity with the story is vital to its success in this translation from stage to screen, creates a world that has been carefully orchestrated to maximize the audience's understanding of its character's decline but to do so by very careful cinematic arrangement in order to balance its accessibility and approachability without sacrificing the fractured perspectives and skewered understanding of its workings. It's a remarkable example of storytelling at its highest level of sophistication, depth, and accessibility alike.

Certainly, though, production design and performances are first-rate, too. This is the role that earned Hopkins his second Best Actor Oscar (following The Silence of the Lambs) and it was well deserved, too. Hopkins is forced to stretch himself in a way that balances an approachable, fun loving man who must simultaneously deal with the challenges of an ever shifting world around him, at least shifting insofar as his perception of it shifts. Hopkins successfully navigates the role with equal parts confidence in his character and inability to distinguish the realities of the world and the realities of his mind. The constant struggle to keep up with his own mind yields a remarkable bit of work that is supported by Olivia Colman's own Oscar-nominated performance as his daughter, a character who is at once both charged to balance her father's skewered reality while also playing a critical part within his own skewered perspective. Colman, like Hopkins, must continually reorient herself to how her father is seeing her, no small accomplishment but one she handles with impeccable grace, timing, and efficiency. The film also makes use of subtle design cues to build the story and reinforce Anthony's cracked worldview. Kitchen tiles change. Furniture rearranges. Artwork comes and goes. Sometimes it's central to a scene, sometimes the change is subtle but always vital in how the film must constantly reorient to whatever Anthony is experiencing at a given time. It's remarkable stuff.

The Father Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Father was digitally photographed and the image translates to 1080p at a quality that approaches the current peak for this type of source on Blu-ray. It's remarkably clean and efficient. It's effortlessly crisp and clean, boasting an extraordinarily high level of detail across the board, ranging from complex facial elements and clothes to apartment furnishings. The action only rarely shifts to other locations but rest assured that even outside of the central set there's no shortage of essential clarity and razor-sharp detail to be found. Colors are bold and expressive and very neutral in contrast. There's a very nice balance between the warmer accents and furnishings inside the flat against some of the more bold examples of clothes that Anne in particular wears throughout the film. Every color appears dialed in for maximum intensity while maintaining critical lifelike balance. Black levels in a couple of dark nighttime shots are fine and skin tones are healthy and accurate. There are no egregious examples of source noise and no encode artifacts of note. One couldn't reasonably expect much better.

The Father Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Sound design is kept simple in The Father. The film is almost entirely dialogue driven, and as the key element it plays with satisfying verbal definition and firm front-center placement. No complaints here. Light musical supports remain up front; there's very little surround activity, really if any at all, and even location specific sound elements, such as very light city din heard outside the flat, offer only cursory, yet still mood-critical, definition. There's really nothing more to it than that. It's as simple as it gets.

The Father Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Sony's Blu-ray release of The Father includes a few extras, including a pair of featurettes, deleted scenes, and a trailer. No DVD or digital copies are included with purchase. This release ships with a non-embossed slipcover.

• Perception Check: Portrait of The Father (1080p, 8:32): Cast and crew discuss the film's structure and perspective, transitioning the original French play to an English language film, cast and performances, characters, and more.
• Homecoming: Making The Father (1080p, 7:06): Exploring Zeller's direction, production design and the benefits film brings to the material over the stage, costumes, and Zeller's direction.
• Deleted Scenes (1080p): Included are I Never Asked You for Anything (2:07), Did He Hear? (2:22), and Frightened (1:38).
• The Father Theatrical Trailer (1080p, 2:15).
• Previews (1080p): Additional Sony titles.

The Father Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Father doesn't hold back. It's not concerned with audience coercion or trying to be cute by dancing around its subject. It's blunt, direct, and heartbreaking in its portrayal of dementia and the cost thereof to the one suffering from it and those trying to bear the burden of caring for the sufferer. At the same time, the film is beautiful in its construction, necessarily fractured and structurally confused as it may be. It's a remarkable example of the cinema craft at both its technical peak and its emotionally impactful best. Sony's Blu-ray delivers first-class video and audio. Supplements are on the thin side -- a commentary track or two, one more technical in nature and one, perhaps, from experts in the field of dementia -- would have been invaluable. Nevertheless, this release comes very highly recommended.