The Father (2020): Time and ageing

When the trailer for Christopher Nolan’s Tenet (2020) dropped last year, one of the biggest expectations we had for the film was that it’s going to reinvent narrative structure. With Nolan’s history of blowing our minds whenever he tackled the concept of time, we had high hopes that Tenet, like Inception, Interstellar etc., is going to change how we think about story structure forever. Sadly, that did not happen. It seems that such innovative attempts at filmmaking will only ever be truly successful when the filmmaker is not constrained by the need to please the audience.

In other words, we might want to turn to the indie world for this.

The Father (2021) is a story of a man and his experience with dementia. It stars Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman, with the former giving one of the best performances of his career. It is an adaptation of a play, an origin that gives the film a true sense of simplicity. The film evolves through dialogue, performances, and simple set changes. With these simple tools, director Florian Zeller created a story whose narrative is not bounded by time.

In fact, one might say that The Father is a movie that moves against time.

Time is the enemy.

The portrayal of dementia as a terrifying phenomenon is not new to film. But rarely has it been done with such effortlessness. Zeller gives a direction so confident he disappears behind the lenses. Hopkins creates a character so lifelike; we don’t recognize the actor by the end. And yes, to reiterate, every other character subtly fills the world. No one, not even Hopkins, plays up their roles. No one overacts even in moments of the emotional apex. It is a film so perfectly helmed by everyone involved, you can’t find a single flaw in it.

(Image credit: Caillou Pettis Movie Reviews)

The subtle perfection of the cast and crew allows the central point of the story to root itself gradually but firmly in our minds. And that is the contingency of memory. We said earlier that in this film, time is the enemy. Here is what we mean by that. As the main character is battling against the demon that is ageing. Its symptoms are memory loss due to dementia.

The most terrifying thing about memory loss is not that we are losing things. We all forget something from time to time. Rather, it is the loss of the ability to make sense of time, ultimately leading to the disconnection between us and the ongoings of the real world.

In that circumstance, we are can no longer make sense of unidirectional time. In fact, the singular direction of time is the very thing destroying our capacity to make sense of it. Like water in a fast-flowing river, Time flows forward but distorts and erodes our relationship with it. What is dementia but an unmooring of the self from the flow of homogenous time?

This movie portrays an individual unstuck in time. All he has left are traces of memories that no longer fit together. The struggle of our protagonist is to try to piece together the different facades of his life as they flow. It is a film that will leave you gutted with emotions. And it will make you rethink storytelling.

Narrowing down on small relatable stories- that seems to be where filmmakers find success when delivering mind-blowing concepts about time.