Father

Bluesky

Bathed in an angelic light punctuated with white lens flare, a man’s life seems to go just up. Michal (Milan Ondrík) is an upbeat father and husband, head of a perfect family. When coming back from his morning run, his wife, Zuzka (Dominika Morávková-Zeleníková), and two-year-old daughter wait for him in the backyard with huge smiles on their faces, as if starring in a commercial. Michal’s typical suburban family dreams come true are doubled by his professional achievements.

The all-too-perfect milieu in which Tereza Nvotová’s Father seems sheltered from all the suffering of the outside world. But soon enough, even their world burns down. Previously, the head of a regional newspaper, Michal’s newsroom world turns against him, sparing no one in the process. These events are taking place during times when the backdrop of everyday life is marked by violence and global warming, with a society ruthless against each other in the midst of a global financial crisis, carefully mirrored in the film. The mise en scene is set, but the plot is keen on scratching only the surface of a couple of these issues, instead of dissecting them.

There has been a fascination with long, one-shot scenes since the proliferation of accessible camera equipment. A supposedly increasing emotional tension, charging up with every complex move a camera executes, tries to create a sense of supposed verisimilitude. Lately, there has been a proliferation of this style in the mainstream media, thanks to lighter cameras that can amp up the resolution to standard cinema quality, and drone technology. Viral TV series Adolescence (2025) prides itself on having episodes of one shot/one take each. Similarly enough thematically, both Father and Adolescence document a man’s/boy’s inner turmoil after committing a crime.

Complex camera movement, spinning around Michal, attempting to get a glimpse of his psyche, fails to probe and spin around inside his mind. His character study relies on a couple of cliches that don’t fully convey the level of complexity that could have been achieved; his battle with depression is expressed through a few minutes of screen time in which Michal is seen in a messy room, ignoring people and scrolling YouTube shorts. Shifting thematically through scenes almost incessantly from one scene to the other, it goes over cardboard cutouts of commonplace plot pieces.

Concluding with a “Based on True Events” card at the end (or beginning) of a film doesn’t raise its credibility. Father is Slovakia’s entry for the 98 th edition of the Oscars, a film that adheres to common principles of storytelling through overcomplex cinematography for its own sake.

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