In the touching drama “The Father,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and is now at the Toronto International Film Festival, Anthony Hopkins plays a man who is slipping into dementia, with moments of clarity and moments of hallucination. And the film itself, which is directed by playwright and first-time director Florian Zeller, adopts the character’s state of mind, keeping the audience off-balance by never letting us know what’s real and what’s illusion.
“I didn’t want to tell the story from the outside, because it’s already been done so many times,” Zeller said when he and stars Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman spoke about the film in TheWrap’s virtual Toronto interview studio.