The Father review: A deeply moving and deceptively simple depiction of dementia

It’s unfair to reduce Anthony Hopkins’s performance to a headline about awards controversies – he was deserving of his Best Actor Oscar

Dir: Florian Zeller. Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Olivia Colman, Mark Gatiss, Imogen Poots, Rufus Sewell, Olivia Williams. Cert 12A, 96 mins

Oscar controversies always feel a little grotesque for the ways they flatten and minimise the work involved. Anthony Hopkins’s performance in The Father, Florian Zeller’s haunting dementia drama, feels delicate and crushingly familiar. And yet, it’s been too easily reduced to a mere pawn in the backlash against this year’s Academy Awards, where producers made the baffling decision to end the night on Best Actor – in the hope that they could close on a tribute to Hopkins’s fellow nominee, the late Chadwick Boseman. But it was Hopkins who won. He was a no-show, for reasons of being 83 years old and in Wales. The ceremony seemed to end on a hurried shrug and an “oops”.

It was a cruel thing for Boseman’s family to be put through. And it was unfair, too, to both Hopkins and The Father – neither deserves to be reduced to a headline or a future piece of Oscars trivia. Zeller’s lovingly put-together film sees Hopkins in the role of Anthony, a man with advancing dementia living in the care of his daughter Anne (Olivia Colman). She can’t bear the idea of putting him in a care facility but finds herself unable to cope with his increasing needs.