Stuck inside the mind of someone who's losing their mind, the world turns into a horribly treacherous and unreliable place.
The whole amorphous mass that is our consciousness is but a loose collection of memories, much like a bowl filling with water, the old overflowing to make space for the new. It’s funny how our minds decide to keep hold of the important stuff from old memories, personality defining traits and experiences, while repressing the rest in some remote corner of the mind to collect dust until recalled again. The fragility of our awareness becomes terrifyingly clear once these already unreliable memories begin to fizzle away into the darkness of the void that surrounds our minds. Especially when the brain is seized by a creeping onset of dementia, slowly corrupting the recollection with a blind darkness. First go the little things like routines and activities, then memories of important life events begin to fall under leaving one with a perforated personality, time then begins to turn loose and jumbled up before the entire understanding of the world and self is lost to the ephemerality of a single moment.
On a grey Sunday that best befits the tone of the film, my girlfriend and I strolled over the cinema and watched The Father (2020), at the end of which she walked out with tears streaming down her face and a crushing feeling of heaviness on my heart that each step felt like a labour. Rows of middle-aged and elderly people were wiping the tears off their cheeks and trying to get a hold of themselves as we exited the screening hall. The general ambience of the hall was that of despairing solemnity and a helpless sort of fear for something that might come for us all. The terribly unsettling manner in which dementia is realised, as the perception knocked off its axis and into a realm that is equally as real as it is unreal, left me quietly disturbed and speechless. The mind in which we find ourselves is Anthony’s, whose encroaching dementia is making his mind slowly drift towards a plunge down into limbo, while his daughter Anne struggles to help him adequately. Of course, we see how the people in the orbit of a dementia sufferer are gravely affected, but the heart of this perturbation is seen through the eyes of Anthony himself, watching the world turn into a perfidious place as his tenuous grasp on his perception slowly loosens and leaves him stuck in a mental labyrinth.
Anthony Hopkins brings Anthony to life in a way that is far away from a character and closer to the experience itself. His confidence in his abilities is at its highest as the film begins, doomed to find itself falling until all independence is lost, and we see his anger turned into confusion and then powerlessness at every turn. It’s not just the explicit emotions and dialogues that house the unnerving reality of his performance, but also those subtle glances feigning composure when clearly everything is going terribly wrong. As the world around him never stops going askew and his disorientation towers to the point where he just can’t keep track of himself anymore, his total loss of hope is mutely reflected in his eyes and caught in one helpless expression. I felt the sheer horrible perplexity of the situations as Ludovico Einaudi’s disconcertingly sharp score cut right through by very bones, a shrill string strangulation paired with a high-pitched whine as the grim realisation comes toppling down that he’s untethered from the real world again.
Based off his own play Le Pére, Florian Zeller’s direction and writing brings this unthinkable malady off the stage and onto the screen in a way that bridges drama, horror and if you push the imagination far enough, a bit of science fiction – bear with me here for that one. This film is weaved together with such immaculate precision that each scene passes through the other rather than sequentially following one another, and then looping back around to start over again, leaving Anthony in the eye of this horrid vortex. It almost feels like he’s lost in a time-loop, having to relive the same circumstances again and again with zero idea of how and from where he got there in the first place. As the film progresses, time begins to lose even more of its substance as entire months and years are condensed within mere minutes of his perception. Playing with the concept of time in a manner that is redolent to the trappings of science fiction lends more gritty realism to a disease that’s unbelievably bewildering. These interlaced strands of memory which take the form of each scene, stitched into this black tapestry left me with a film that is empathetic, heart breaking and distressing, delivered in an emphatic way.
Then there’s the lingering camera which moves slowly yet surely through Anthony’s perilous space, matching the pace of his cognitive degradation. Those measured and lamentable pans into doors, down corridors and through his apartment signal a subconscious check of his apartment as an attempt to ground himself and ensure that everything is where it should be, much like his fixation with the watch. Both Anthony and Anne are framed surrounded by pain and suffering, both of a very different kind. Anne caught within symmetrical shots and harsh lights as she’s running out of options when it comes to helping her father, whereas everything around Anthony loses focus through the camera the more unreliable his mind becomes.
The moment what remains of Anthony fades away in the throes of a climactic mental breakdown, leaving him in a purgatory of time where age and place no longer correlate with reality, he finally articulates exactly what he feels is happening to him. Tied intimately to the final image of trees swaying in the wind outside his window, I felt the distinct impression that his memories will always be on the wrong side of the window for him.
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