The film uses a repetitive and fragmented sensory narrative to tell the story of an elderly and ill Anthony Hopkins who is facing a difficult life choice – whether to move to a nursing home or accept a new caregiver her daughter is looking for. In the process, Anthony finds himself as if he has entered a strange journey through time and space, with confused memories and timelines intertwining with bizarre stories, and strangers and familiar people who also make him confused.
The film is based on the french novelist and playwright Frolain Zeller's stage play Father.
The film has been nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture: Hopkins and Coleman also received nominations for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress, and Anthony Hopkins won his second Academy Award for Best Actor — his first for "The Silence of the Lambs" in 1992 — in which he played the role of a man who gradually died of dementia in Florian Zeller's heartbreaking debut, Father Stuck in Time.
Hopkins clearly enjoyed the challenges thrown at him. In some scenes Anthony is robust and lively: in others, he bends down like a sick king, trying to grasp some fragment of self-sufficiency. Sometimes he roared like a tyrant, but sometimes he was as bitter and weak as a kitten, confused by a changing world, confused by people.
Zeller's film is scripted after the audience's own views on the real and imaginary. It subtly tells the story from the perspective of the mind of a person who cannot discern reality and delusion. "Father Trapped in Time" is quite possibly the first film to truly convey the feeling of being in dementia, and it has an excellent innovative spirit in the narrative sense, which is heartbreaking. What's even more striking is that it attracts the audience's trust and pieces together all the parts of this great puzzle. Zeller gives us a dense and complex story in which what we think is true is often delusional and vice versa.
Dementia is a familiar catalyst in movies, from "Amur" and "Quiet Alice" to the most recent "Falling" and "Supernova," but "Father Trapped in Time" is the first to sweep us into the seesaw trauma of the unharmed mind. It is in the midst of visual chaos that the on-screen version of Father Trapped in Time raises the artistic standards of stage productions. Cameras, settings, designs, and furniture were subtly shifted to show that Anthony had lost the bearings of his time, not knowing where he was now, from scene to field. The disorienting effect continued when the father saw another woman (Olivia Williams) claiming to be his daughter, and two men (Mark Gatis and Rufus Sever) alternate as her husbands, and they were both determined to get Anthony out of their lives.
Of course, it's all about Hopkins, who is playing a modern version of the crazy, daughter-psychedelic King Lear, culminating in a collapse scene that rivals the film's peak acting skills. Zeller says he had Hopkins in mind when he wrote Father. It's not hard to see why. The matching of actors and characters is destined to be immortal on the silver screen. Hopkins roared at the demise of the light. He made "Father" an indispensable point of view.
The great show goes like this: it can illuminate the world and lift your spirits, even if the subject matter is hidden in darkness.
Father Trapped in Time is a horror film without supernatural elements: all its horrors are implicit, drawn from the human mind itself, especially in old age. Ideally, being an old man would be given dignity: society should respect and value you more. At the same time, individuals will be subjected to more and more insults. Basic bodily functions become complex. People tell you just like you did when you were a kid. And people around you start to think you don't remember things — or maybe it's because you really can't.