Anthony Hopkins shows us horrors

FILM

The Father ★★★★
97 minutes, rated M, in cinemas from April 1

Anthony Hopkins occupies the screen like King Lear in a cardigan in The Father. It’s a kind of horror film, if horror be also tragedy. It’s not scary-horror, but it should scare the stuffing out of anybody who has contemplated their own failing memory. That prospect is far scarier than anything Freddy Krueger ever threw at us.

It’s based on a French play, Le Pere, part of a trilogy by 41-year-old Florian Zeller, who also directs the film, his first. Zeller has been acclaimed as the new saviour of world theatre, and other extravagances, since The Father hit the stage in Paris, where it won the 2014 Moliere award for best play. It has been produced in many countries. John Bell starred in an Australian production at the Sydney Theatre Company in 2017.

Part of the originality is that the text is infinitely adaptable rather than defiantly French: the problems of ageing apply to all cultures. In the film, the widower Anthony (Hopkins) occupies a large and well-appointed flat in some leafy part of London. In the first scene, his daughter Anne (Olivia Colman) arrives unannounced as he is listening to classical music on headphones. Why are you here, he asks, bewildered. She has come to ask why he chased off his latest carer. He plays dumb.

We learn nothing about Anthony’s background, save that he was once an engineer. He tells Imogen Poots, as the next young woman to audition as carer, that he was once a tap dancer. Total fiction, says Anne. She’s going mad in her own way, trying to find someone who can put up with his tirades and his increasingly nasty suspicions that people are stealing his things.

Zeller’s clever idea is to put us inside his head, more than those around him. He does this by shifting the idea of what is real. In one difficult scene, Anne, long divorced, tells her father why he must get used to having a carer. She has fallen in love again and wants to move to Paris. The next time he sees Anne, she denies all knowledge of the plan.

Anthony encounters a stranger in his living room (Mark Gatiss). The man claims to be Anne’s husband. Hopkins asks him if the Paris plan is off, then realises he may have let a cat out of a bag, revealing this “other man”. He laughs, cries “oops” and covers his mouth in a gesture that belies his age. That’s part of the brilliance of Hopkins’ performance: even though his character is 80, he forgets to behave like that. It’s partly denial, partly dementia, partly devilry. He may be regressing.

As these reality shifts take hold, the depth of his tragedy begins to bite. Olivia Williams arrives, calling him dad, but he doesn’t recognise her. Likewise, Rufus Sewell, who brings a dash of malevolence as…. who? By this stage, we’re not sure who or what is real either. We’re inside the terrifying maze of his dementia, where even the walls seem to shift.