MEMORY, LOST

OLIVIA COLMAN and Anthony Hopkins are dependably interesting actors. The Father — directed by Florian Zeller, bringing his 2012 play to the screen — fails them both. Hopkins plays an aging, cultured man whose mind is slowly starting to deteriorate. The story has us experience this from his perspective: memory slips, identity mix-ups, conflations of time and place. Eventually, different actors sub in as family members (Colman, Olivia Williams, Rufus Sewell), reality blurs, things fall apart, and the center cannot hold. This must have been something to see on stage, where the confusions of the man’s mind might have proved more disorienting and provocative. But the film suffers under the weight of its conceit, coming off less as an act of perspectival sympathy than as a trick being played on the audience. The Oscar reels will sizzle. The movie does not.