My apartment feels wrong.
That's the first thought. The very first thing that pops into my head after the credits roll on Hulu. I'm sitting on my couch, the one with the weird stain on the left cushion from that time I spilled red wine, and for a second, I don't recognize it. I look at the lamp in the corner, the one I bought at IKEA last year, and it feels like a stranger's lamp. My own living room. That's what this movie does to you. It gets inside your head and rearranges the furniture.
It's 11:47 PM and I just finished The Father and I feel like I need to call my mom just to make sure she's still my mom and hasn't been replaced by another, slightly different actor. I'm not even kidding. I literally had to pause it about halfway through—Hulu's little "Are you still watching?" bar blinking at me mockingly—and just stand up and walk around my tiny apartment. I touched the kitchen counter. I looked in the mirror. I had to make sure my own face was still the same one I saw this morning. It's that kind of movie. It's a gaslight.
Anthony Hopkins. Jesus Christ. I mean, we all know he's a legend, right? Hannibal Lecter and all that. But this... this is something else entirely. He plays Anthony, this old man, this stubborn, proud, funny, and then terrifying man, who's losing his mind. And the movie doesn't show it from the outside. It puts you INSIDE his mind. It's a hall of mirrors where nothing is ever what it seems. One minute his daughter is Olivia Colman, the next she's this other woman, Laura, and he's the only one who notices the switch. Or is he? I don't know. I was so lost, in the best possible way.
There's this moment. It's a small thing. A tiny detail that is now just... lodged in my brain. He's looking for his watch. His daughter gave him a watch. He's always losing it, always accusing people of stealing it. It's this recurring point of contention, this little anchor of reality for him that keeps slipping away. And at the end... oh god, the end. When he's crying for his mother, and he talks about the watch. He says he can't find it. And the nurse asks him why it's so important. And he says, through tears, "Because she gave it to me." But he's not talking about his daughter anymore. He's talking about his own mother. The whole timeline of his life has collapsed into a single, agonizing point of confusion and grief. I physically put my hand over my mouth. I just sat there, mouth agape, tears streaming down my face. It's not a jump scare. It's a soul scare.
It reminds me of my grandpa. Before he passed. He started forgetting things. Little things at first, then bigger things. I remember visiting him one Sunday and he called me by my dad's name. I just laughed it off, said something stupid like "Geez, Grandpa, I haven't put on that much weight!" But inside... inside it felt like a little crack had formed in the world. A few months later, he didn't know who I was at all. He just smiled politely at this stranger in his living room. I... I can't.
But honestly, now that I'm typing this, was I just manipulated? Was the whole shifting-reality thing just a gimmick? A clever trick to make me feel disoriented? I thought it was brilliant, a work of genius, a perfect way to depict dementia. But now, in the quiet of my apartment, with the movie's spell slightly broken... was it just confusing? Did it rely too much on its own structural cleverness instead of just letting the performance speak for itself? I don't know. Maybe the confusion IS the point. Maybe I'm not supposed to know. God, this movie makes me second-guess everything.
Watching it at home felt almost too intimate. It was just me, the glow of the TV, and this man's mind unraveling. I had a glass of water on the coaster next to me, and I kept picking it up and putting it down, just to have something solid to hold onto. At one point, my phone buzzed with a notification from work and I nearly jumped out of my skin. It felt like an intrusion from another reality, a reality where I have to answer emails about Q3 projections, a reality that suddenly felt a million miles away from the flat in London where Anthony was losing his keys, his daughter, his mind.
And the flat itself! It keeps changing. The layout, the wallpaper, the furniture. One minute it's his place, the next it's his daughter's. And he's the only one who seems to notice, or at least the only one who comments on it. It's like the physical manifestation of his memory collapsing. I was so turned around. I kept trying to map it out in my head, "Okay, so the front door is here, and the kitchen is there..." and then in the next scene, boom, everything is different. It's maddening. And brilliant. I think. I'm going in circles.
And Olivia Colman. She deserves every award. Just the quiet desperation in her eyes. The way her face falls when he says something cruel, not because he means it, but because his brain is a broken machine spitting out broken glass. The love and the frustration warring on her face in every single scene. It's heartbreaking. It's the most real thing I've ever seen. She's trying so hard to hold onto him, to hold onto her own reality, but he's slipping through her fingers like sand.
So, yeah. I'm a wreck. I feel emotionally drained and mentally scrambled. I'm going to go to bed and probably have dreams where my own apartment keeps changing layout and my cat starts speaking with a different accent. It's not a "fun" movie. It's not a "feel-good" movie. It's an essential movie, maybe. A movie that makes you feel the terror and the sadness of losing yourself, piece by piece. It makes you want to call everyone you love and just hold them close and memorize their faces before they change.
I don't know if I can recommend it. It's like telling someone they should definitely get the flu. It's an experience, for sure. A profound, devastating, and utterly unforgettable one. Just... maybe watch it with someone. And maybe have a stiff drink handy. Or two.
9/10 - banger
- alex