The Father · reception & legacy
2020 · Florian Zeller
How The Father has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
Acclaimed from its Sundance 2020 debut, but Hopkins's Oscar win was initially overshadowed by the ceremony chaos around it — five years on, the noise has faded and the film has settled in as the definitive dementia movie, with the win now widely seen as earned on pure merit.
What's debated
Film Twitter still relitigates the 2021 Best Actor race — was Hopkins's win a deserved career-capper or did the Academy rob Chadwick Boseman's posthumous moment?
Its footprint
It's forever tied to the most anticlimactic Oscars ending in memory: producers moved Best Actor to close the show, Hopkins won instead of Boseman and was asleep in Wales, and the ceremony just... stopped. Meanwhile 'I feel as if I'm losing all my leaves' became the line reviewers can't stop quoting.
Where it stands
A Letterboxd staple of 'emotionally devastating' lists — the film people dare each other to watch, then warn each other about.