It’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to look at a
proper mind-screw of a film. And what’s more, this is about as far from the
high-concept sci-fi trappings or Lynchian dream narratives I’ve come to
associate such things with. This is as grounded as grounded gets, focusing on
one man (Anthony, as played by Anthony Hopkins) as he interacts with his
daughter (Olivia Colman), her husband (Rufus Sewell), and… well, beyond that
point, it’s hard to tell. Because, for as domestic as this is, it might be one
of the most disorienting films I’ve ever watched, let alone reviewed on here. And that's not an insult; that's me praising the fuck out of this movie.
The story at large is about dementia and its entire story structure is built to reinforce that. Anthony isn’t so much losing his memory as he is remembering everything in the wrong order, and the audience is right along with him on that. Not only is the timeline of the film shuffled, to the point where days, months, possibly years are bleeding into each other, but there’s quite a few doppelgangers at work here. Not in the Double ‘a better you is replacing you’ sense; it’s more like Charlie Kaufman’s directorial work or possibly Horse Girl in how it actively fucks with the audience’s perception of other people. This is primarily through the performances of Mark Gatiss and Olivia Williams, who appear as characters we’ve already been introduced to but… aren’t.
If all of this is starting to sound convoluted, know that that is entirely the point. As Anthony goes through the mismatched jigsaw collection of events shown, every moment of confusion is echoed by the claustrophobic cinematography courtesy of Ben Smithard, the set design which subtly adds to the disorientation and perpetual déjà vu, and how the sequence of events is out-of-order… but still feels like it’s all linear. It’s a film about mental illness that puts the audience directly in the lead’s point-of-view, resulting in one of the most empathetic depictions I’ve seen yet for how well it makes us see what he sees. I get the feeling ‘dementia simulator’ would be a crass and ineffective way to describe all this, but that is genuinely what it feels like to watch.
And while Hopkins’ performance is all kinds of affecting, the way the other characters react to him carries a lot of weight for the larger depiction of mental health. It is quite refreshing how many punches aren’t pulled here, like with how Anthony puts his foot down about a carer (Imogen Poots) talking to him like he’s retarded, or a quite monstrous moment when Sewell’s Paul lashes out at Anthony for what he’s putting his family through, which reaches the point of Fridge Horror when it sets in that, technically, we don’t see what happened… and yet we did. Because it’s not as if mistreatment of the elderly is a rarity these days.
While the story’s genesis as a play is quite apparent from the insular framing and use of actors (and it certainly looks like it would work a treat on the stage), the adaptation work here by original author Florian Zeller (who also makes a killer directorial debut with this) and Dangerous Liaisons writer Christopher Hampton makes it feel right for the cinematic plane. It’s almost like a horror movie in how genuinely terrifying its character study gets, and that’s without me getting into how this is basically a nightmare scenario for me personally.
It fucking hurt to watch this thing, but not because of the intentionally confusing presentation. It hurts because it is a 97-minute-long window into an existence that 50 million people are living with all over the world, right now, as I’m typing this. And the vision through that window is so clear, and so effective at translating something so inherently difficult to articulate, that it highlights the cinematic artform as a tool of profound understanding. It’s a psychological drama that thoroughly earns every moment of upset it generates, and even as someone who loves films that get into the inner workings of the human mind (literally or otherwise), I was not prepared for just how moving this is.
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