Why a new crop of films about dementia are melting Hollywood’s heart

Florian Zeller’s 2012 play The Father is all set in one apartment – a stripped down study of dementia. Not too challenging, perhaps, to adapt for cinema. But Zeller, who has made his directorial debut with his Oscar-winning film The Father, starring Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman, didn’t want to merely shoot the play. “I wanted to do something that only cinema can do,” he says, noting that a rookie move would have been to open it up, to get outside, to expand it. Instead he kept it completely confined.

But there’s magic going on here. Zeller says he wanted The Father to be cinematic, which at first seems strange – the word ‘cinematic’ makes us think of sweeping vistas and epic images, while the film is confined to the four walls of that apartment. What Zeller wanted, it seems, was to squeeze the medium for all its worth in order to emotionally affect us. To make some cinema. “Exactly,” he says.

The Father is epic. Concerning Anthony, an elderly man (Hopkins) with dementia, living alone, it introduces him as he goes about his business, being visited by his daughter (Colman) and a carer (Imogen Poots), while becoming increasingly bewildered by everything and everyone surrounding him. It’s a simple conceit, extraordinarily executed: within those four walls, by portraying events from Anthony’s point of view, the film takes us on an incredible journey, allowing us to experience – even if it’s just fractionally – the heartache of dementia. And a whole host of other filmmakers are also exploring the disease, each coming at it from a different angle.

This isn’t new, of course – in the past 20 years we’ve had Still Alice, Iris, Away With Her, Amour to name a few – tender and effective stories. But today, directors are finding new ways in. With a heightened societal focus on mental health and evolving dementia studies and treatment, as a culture we are more attuned to the illness than ever, and these filmmakers are investing their work with their personal experiences, leaning into genre to tell distinct, nuanced stories.

In the last couple of years we’ve had Relic, an Australian horror about Edna, a grandmother with dementia in a house physically rotting with a black mould mirroring her deterioration; Elizabeth Is Missing, the 2019 BBC production with Glenda Jackson as an 80-year-old with Alzheimer’s, struggling to piece things together while searching for her missing friend; Falling, Viggo Mortensen’s film about a middle-aged gay man taking in his vitriolic, homophobic father; and The Artist’s Wife, about an artist whose wife begins to take control of her own career after his diagnosis.

This month sees two of the most significant takes on dementia. The Father, for which Anthony Hopkins won an Oscar in April, is out now in the UK, and later this month there is Supernova, starring Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth as a couple whose relationship is tested by the ways in which Tucci’s character Tusker sets out his future.

All have first-hand origins. The Father was inspired by Zeller’s experiences with his grandmother, whose dementia began to emerge when he was 15 years old. “She was more than my grandmother, she was very important to me,” he says now. “She raised me. She was, in a way, like my mother. She was a very powerful, strong personality, always in control of everything in her life, so it was even more painful to see this strong personality being challenged, having to let it go. Trying to keep order when there is no order anymore.”

His play, though, was not about his grandmother, and is not his story. “I was just trying to catch my emotions,” he says. “When you find yourself in a painful position when you are suddenly powerless and impotent. When love is not enough. When you want the best but you don't know what the best is. When you become the parent of your parent, or of your grandparents. There are no clear answers.”

Tom Dolby, writer and director of The Artist’s Wife, was inspired by his time with his father, who had Alzheimer’s, and seeing how his mother navigated it. Falling is a fictional story but both of Viggo Mortensen’s parents had dementia; he began writing it on the plane ride home from his mother’s funeral. Natalie Erika James, director of Relic, drew from her grandmother’s Alzheimer’s, vividly remembering the first time she couldn’t remember who she was. Emma Healey’s book Elizabeth Is Missing was adapted by screenwriter Andrea Gibb, whose father and grandfather had dementia, “so I could call on experiences that I had witnessed.”

Around 2015, Harry Macqueen, the British writer/director of Supernova, was working for a year with a woman in her fifties who had young-onset dementia. During that time he saw how it affected her personality and her work. She was fired, and died a year later. Around the same time, a friend’s father, who also had young-onset dementia, was put into a home just after turning 60. Both experiences lead Macqueen to want to learn more about it. He began doing part-time voluntary work at University College London’s Dementia Research Centre, as well as at various charities, studying it and spending considerable time with people who had early-onset dementia, watching them – and the people around them – change as a result.

After a couple of years of this work he began to think that it could make for a good film, so dug deeper. “I was really aware that if I was going to make a film about it,” he says, “as a moral imperative I needed to spend a lot of time immersing myself in that world.” He wanted to do justice to those people, and to avoid melodrama. “These situations are rarely dramatic,” he explains. “It's a constant background drama that in my view is infinitely more powerful than those big melodramatic moments that one might assume happen when you're living with someone with dementia. So I was really keen to make a film that was more focused on the intimacy of the relationship and let everything else sit in the background, in a horrific way. That was something that other dementia films I'd seen don't really do.”

Having spent a few years studying it, though, Macqueen put all the research aside, to write the film “in an organic and original way.” Zeller – alongside co-writer Christopher Hampton, who has translated many of his plays into English – also approached The Father from a non-academic perspective. “It was based on something emotional,” he says. “And because I was not trying to describe clinically what it is as a disease, it was more the experience. And it's not only about dementia, but about mortality, about your own feeling about mortality, the feeling of being abandoned, the cry for help for your mother. We all have those feelings in ourselves. And so it was purely instinctively that I wrote it, feeling what it would mean to be in this rational world with no logic anymore.”

In some ways The Father minimises the content of the play to achieve a greater effect on screen. The first thing Hampton advised was to pare away the dialogue – the actors can do more with their eyes in close-up than entire speeches can on the stage, he explained. Looks could speak volumes. They wrote in shots of Anthony (Zeller changed the character’s name from André to break down barriers on set) staring down corridors, contemplating his ever-unfamiliar environment. And we too feel what he feels, thanks to trickery written into the script and executed via production design. We’re not quite sure who people are. Events repeat themselves in different ways. Chronology seems wonky. Objects disappear or suddenly seem to be in the wrong places. Colours change, which we may or may not be aware of – it just doesn’t feel right. It’s horrifically discombobulating.

“I wanted to put the audience in a unique position, as if we were going through a labyrinth, as if we were in the main character's head,” explains Zeller. “Because if you see this kind of process from the outside it's very disturbing to see someone you know becoming someone you do not recognise, and sometimes aggressive or paranoid or cruel. The Father was a way to try and understand that. I wanted it to be not only a story but an experience of what it could be to lose your own bearings, including as a viewer. When you watch the film you can understand the anxiety, the rage, the paranoia, all of those elements that change you. I think this is the beauty of cinema, to improve your own experience of what life is when it's not your own experience. To create empathy, and to make that difficult journey through this labyrinth more understandable for us.”

The disorientating effects of dementia were key for Zeller, and also for Macqueen, who didn’t want a muddled memory to be the main aspect of Tusker’s condition. Supernova is a sweet and sad portrayal of a 20-year relationship under pressure. Small moments hit home, like Tusker quietly struggling to put on a jumper. At one point there’s a visual cue – a discovery – that sinks the heart, and presumably came from something Macqueen witnessed during his time studying dementia.

“It did,” he says. “Tusker has posterior cortical atrophy, PCA, a type of on-set dementia which affects the posterior of your brain. And because of that it affects your spatial awareness and your vision and your ability to read and write, often way before it affects your memory or things that would present as Alzheimer's or dementia. It felt like an interesting one to explore because to all intents and purposes that person is lucid and can converse and is present most of the time but also very definitely isn't in unseen ways. And I wanted to let the audience be an active participant in the experience, rather than telling them what to think.”

Despite the different intentions of all of these films, each director has spoken of wanting to convey a sense of some part of the dementia experience, whether it’s from the perspective of the person who has it, or a caregiver. Edna’s house in Relic is as labyrinthine as The Father’s, but in an overtly physical way, with mysterious passages, staircases that don’t go anywhere, walls that weren’t there before and dead-end doors. Director Natalie Erika James had watched a documentary about a man with Alzheimer’s in which he had been lost in his own home and the idea of the house in Relic was to replicate that feeling, “of going into your kitchen, without knowing how to get to your bedroom.” She wanted the house to mess “with the architectural logic in the same way that Alzheimer’s affects the brain,” to have the other characters in the film – Edna’s daughter and granddaughter – to undergo something of what Edna was experiencing.

Yet the experience doesn’t necessarily need to be confusing. With The Falling, Viggo Mortensen was intent on presenting the opposite. His take on what he saw with family members – quite a few others apart from his parents had dementia – was that they never thought they were confused. Their reality, he said while promoting the film last year, is just as valid as ours, and that the caregivers are the ones who get perplexed.

Harry Macqueen says that his time with caregivers over the years was what inspired him to make his film. “I was really interested in how dementia and terminal illnesses affect love,” he explains. “What the collateral damage is of this disease. Supernova is a film about the transitional period that someone has to go through from being an equal party in a relationship to being a carer. That long and infinitely complex transition. That focus on the person that is watching the other person slowly unravel I found really inspiring.”

At the very least, all of these films bring more awareness to dementia. One of the reasons former MP Glenda Jackson did Elizabeth Is Missing – her first screen role in almost 30 years – was because the story concerned issues that she had “been banging on about for a decade,” she said. “In Britain, dementia is still defined by the National Health Service as an incurable disease, and so you have to pay for the care, which is impossible for many. And there is insufficient money being put into research.”

Films shouldn’t be about providing answers but asking questions, says Zeller. “And then everyone can be in that cinema with their own personality and sensibility and come up with a personal answer about what should be done.” Macqueen has similar thoughts. “Films that are pieces of art that confront socio-political points the best do so by not confronting them head-on,” he says. “You wrap it up in something that an audience can fall in love with and invest their emotions with. Then the other stuff can sit quite nicely in the background. You want an audience to leave the cinema and confront those things in their own lives after the fact.”

That empathetic reaction is what counts. We spend much of the early part of The Father trying to figure out who’s who’s who and what’s what. The point is that we can’t completely do that. “You can play with all of the pieces to try to make it work, to try to make it coherent and meaningful, but there is always one piece of that puzzle that is missing,” explains Zeller. “That’s done on purpose, so that you can never completely sum up the plot. What I wanted for the audience is for the moment to come where you have to accept that your brain is not capable of understanding everything. You have to let it go. And when you do that you can understand the whole story on a more emotional level.”

There are some fundamental commonalities in dementia. But there are different branches of the illness, and no two situations are the same. Everybody’s experience, from the person living with it to the caregivers also living with it – is unique, and as such, films exploring it will be unique. These distinct depictions will keep on coming, adding to the discourse, further illuminating the illness. And, maybe, paving more way for change.

The Father is in cinemas now. Supernova will be released on June 25