The Father and Tár: Two Portraits of a Collapsing Mind

The hardest prisons are the ones we build inside our own minds, then forget where we put the key.

Anthony Hopkins’ performance in The Father, and Cate Blanchett’s in Tár, put us through a harsh experience of watching the collapse of a “central authority” within the human psyche. Here we’re watching a moment of disintegration, where the soul loses its grip on reality, and a sharp mind turns into a weapon that turns on its owner, tearing him apart mercilessly within the walls of unforgiving closed rooms.

The Father

In The Father, we watch Anthony’s world dissolve bit by bit; the memory that was once his storehouse and refuge has become a traitor, scrambling places and faces. The cinematic brilliance here lies in making the viewer experience that same disorientation, as the apartment turns from a space of safety into an existential maze whose walls close in with every memory that evaporates. Anthony Hopkins embodies the pride of a man who refuses to admit his own fragility, clinging to his watch and his identity as the last threads tying him to a world that’s leaving him against his will. The narrative follows the “fluidity” that afflicts memory, turning time into an enemy that erases features and leaves a person alone facing a terrifying question about what the “self” even is once the past disappears.

Tár

In Tár, meanwhile, the battle unfolds around “artistic greatness” and excessive pride. Lydia Tár lives at the peak of the musical power pyramid, convinced her genius grants her immunity from moral accountability. The collapse here starts from within, fed by a paranoia that feeds on the fear of losing control; mysterious knocking sounds and passing faces become omens of the fall of the empire she built. Cate Blanchett paints, with astonishing skill, the erosion of that steel-hard character, as absolute control over the orchestra turns into an absolute inability to control the rhythm of her own collapsing life. The pain in this film comes from discovering that the peak Lydia reached is, in truth, an “execution platform” built by her own arrogance.

The two works intersect at the point of “the self exploding”: while Anthony collapses because the biological bonds of his mind are dissolving, Lydia collapses because the moral and social bonds that fenced in her existence are dissolving. Both are trapped in their own space, wrestling with ghosts no one else can see, paying a steep price for an intelligence that refuses to surrender to reality. The narrative coldly observes that moment when a person realizes their reality has become a set falling apart, and that the power they wielded for so long, whether the power of a father or the power of a maestro, has vanished, leaving behind a person stripped bare before his primal fear.

The film stages that disintegration formally rather than only narratively. The apartment’s furniture rearranges itself between scenes, a hallway leads somewhere it didn’t lead a minute earlier, and at certain points a different actor delivers lines that belong to the same daughter, so the audience loses its bearings at roughly the pace Anthony loses his. It’s a rare case of a formal trick actually earning its place in a film, because the confusion isn’t a puzzle for the viewer to solve. It’s the only honest way to represent a mind that no longer has a stable narrator sitting behind it.

Tár builds its unraveling out of smaller, stranger disturbances long before any public scandal breaks: a metronome that keeps ticking after Lydia has switched it off, a red notebook left behind by a former student whose suicide she is working very hard not to think about, a neighbor’s dog she can’t stop hearing through the wall. None of it is supernatural. It’s a mind manufacturing its own haunting out of a guilt it refuses to name directly, which is why the film’s final image, Lydia reduced to conducting a score for a costumed audience on the other side of the world, lands less like punishment than like a mirror held up to the exact scale of what she’s lost.

It would flatten both films to read them purely as morality tales about pride getting its comeuppance. Anthony did nothing to deserve his collapse; dementia isn’t a verdict on character, and The Father is most devastating precisely because it refuses to let cruelty explain what’s happening to him. Lydia is a fairer target for that reading, since her fall is tangled up with real accusations about how she used her position, but even there, the film is careful never to fully confirm what she did or didn’t do, keeping the audience close to Lydia’s own unreliable vantage point rather than above it. What finally separates the two collapses isn’t the cause, it’s the audience’s access to blame: we can’t blame Anthony at all, and we’re never quite allowed to fully blame or clear Lydia either, and that asymmetry, not the diagnosis and not the scandal, is the real subject of both films.