Martin Jameson looks at two key recent movies – the Oscar-winning The Father and Relic – in their handling of dementia.

Before I get trolled right under the bridge, I’m talking here about ‘horror’ as a genre – I’m not using the word as a simplistic or stigmatizing pejorative for dementia. Thought I’d better just make that clear before we get started. Oh yes, and there will be a few spoilers.

I first saw The Father on stage back in 2016. It blew me away. Kenneth Cranham in the eponymous role was astonishing, and it was only about half an hour in, that you realised that the play was pinning you to your seat and taking you right inside the mind of a man whose cognitive faculties were disintegrating before your eyes. You weren’t just passively watching a play, as items of furniture were subtly picked away from the stage, scene by scene, you were right in there, experiencing his disorientation, doubting your own sanity, unable to trust your own senses. Florian Zeller’s play was dubbed something of a theatrical milestone.

Spool forward five years and Anthony Hopkins has rightly bagged a second Academy Award for a quite remarkable performance. It’s easy to be cynical about all those ‘give-me-an-Oscar’ performances where an actor gets the gong for pretending to have a ‘pick-your-disability’, and they often rub this reviewer up the wrong way, but obviously he’s not taking anyone’s gig by acting the advancing stages of dementia, and Hopkins does it with an almost unbearably light touch. It is career defining in a career that he has already defined brilliantly more times than most actors could dare to dream.

But…

There’s something about the movie version of The Father that doesn’t work for me, and in getting to the heart of that I found myself reflecting on last year’s Australian horror offering, Relic, which earned not one, but two 10/10 ratings from this website. Relic, for anyone who hasn’t seen it, uses haunted house and body horror tropes to explore exactly the same subject, as Emily Mortimer’s mother endures the same decline as Hopkins does in The Father.

So why put the two movies in a cage fight?  Most people I know have never heard of Relic. It didn’t get a general release, only making its way to a few art houses just before the second major lockdown started in November 2020. It got a few positive reviews in the broadsheets, but aside from a couple of obscure nominations it has been overlooked by all the major awards.

I contend that Relic is a far more successful, significant and insightful in its exploration of Alzheimer’s and other dementias than The Father could ever hope to be.  In translating his own stage play to the screen Zeller has turned an experience into an observation. Essentially, we are ‘watching’ Hopkins’s astounding performance – and rightly applauding it – and while the film fractures and loops its chronology, and plays around with confusion of identity, it also spends time with Olivia Coleman where we are asked to forget Hopkins’ POV which greatly dilutes the overall effect. We are passive observers, albeit extremely depressed passive observers, by the movie’s close. Even in its more successful cinematic moments, where Zeller tries to capture Hopkins’s cognitive confusion, the eye-popping originality of the stage iteration is now rendered in tropes more than familiar to anyone with a basic grounding in movie horror. SFB readers have, literally, seen all of this before, but The Father wouldn’t see itself as a genre film.  My guess is, it would consider itself ‘above’ such things, which is why in this reviewer’s opinion it falls between two rather uncertain stools, and misses out on what embracing horror as a genre can bring.

Relic, on the other hand, hugs horror and magical realism close to its creative bosom and is all the better for it. It doesn’t just ‘observe’ cognitive decline, it digs deep into what it actually means, and where words can no longer capture that, it uses the imagery ripped from the classic horror playbook and makes us confront not just the experience of dementia, but its place in the inevitable, unstoppable cycle of the generations. I’ve seen it twice and I’m still thinking about it.

Of course, there should be space for both movies, but it irks me that one has more critical kudos than the other. It is yet another example of a certain snobbery that still exists in how many critics perceive cinema, where horror is often talked about in patronising terms, when in reality, directors like Zeller would do well to watch and learn.

But don’t take my word for it. Go to see The Father, for sure, but then sit down with Relic and decide for yourself which you prefer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Martin Jameson 21st June 2021