Dementia, Cognitive Narratology, and Unreliable Narration in Florian Zeller’s The Father

Florian Zeller’s The Father is a film about dementia as a narrative disorder. The film tells a fragmented story through the eyes of Anthony, who is living with late-onset dementia. In it, the spectator is asked to witness Anthony’s encounters with his environment, which always result in a cognitive blankness—a lack of recognition that is the symptom of his condition. The film both represents and enacts this blankness by asking the spectator to witness and misunderstand a series of scenes strung together by nothing more than that lack of recognition. The Father thus constitutes not only a narrative of dementia but also a narrative about narrative—about its grammars, processes, and agents; about the questions of narratability and cognition attendant to any act of storytelling, and about how the answers to those questions might change when they are posed in the cinematic.