97 min | PG-13 | February 26, 2021 | Sony Pictures Classics
An aging man refuses the caregiver his daughter has hired. His memory is collapsing, and the film locks you inside the wreckage with him. You do not watch dementia here. You get lost in it.
Anthony is an eighty-year-old man living in a London flat. His daughter is arranging care because his memory is failing. The film refuses to let you watch this from the outside. Florian Zeller stages the entire story inside Anthony’s deteriorating perception, so the flat rearranges itself, the daughter wears two different faces, and time folds back on itself without warning. This is not a film about dementia. It is a film that traps you in it.
Anthony Hopkins plays Anthony as a man who weaponizes charm to hide the terror underneath. He flatters one caregiver and accuses another of theft in the same afternoon. Hopkins lets the confidence collapse in real time. He builds a man certain of his own competence and then shows that certainty draining out of his eyes. Olivia Colman plays Anne with exhausted love and visible guilt. She holds her face together for her father and lets it break the moment he looks away. Rufus Sewell and Olivia Williams play the same role at different moments, and the casting itself becomes the disorientation.
Zeller directs his first feature from a screenplay he wrote with Christopher Hampton, adapting his own stage play. The trick is in the production design. The flat is the only fixed location, and the set changes between scenes in ways the audience registers before it understands them. A kitchen tile shifts color. A painting vanishes from a wall. Furniture moves. The editing cuts between repeated conversations with small alterations, so you start doubting what you saw two scenes ago. You are placed exactly where Anthony lives.
The film never explains itself, because Anthony cannot explain himself. It withholds the orienting information that every other drama hands you for free. The result is a horror movie about losing the architecture of your own mind. The final scene strips away the formal games and leaves a man alone with the one fear underneath all of it. It earns that ending by making you feel lost first.