Father

Bluesky

Editor's note: This review contains detail of a plot development that some might consider 'a spoiler', proceed with care

A question burrows its way under the skin. How do you forget a child? A forgetful morning unravels into an unbearable nightmare in Slovak director Tereza Nvotová’s Father, observing the collapse of a man’s inner world.

Michal (Milan Ondrík), a well-off father in his forties, jogs through the still-sleeping city, the camera gliding behind and ahead of him. It’s one of those early hours when the world feels suspended – when the mind hums on autopilot just to make it through the day. The camera stays close as he returns home to Zuzka (Dominika Morávková) and their two-year-old daughter, Domi, whom he must take to daycare. It’s an ordinary morning, shown patiently through a long take that traps us inside the illusion of domestic routine. Each movement bears the deceptive ease of habit, while Michal’s mind already drifts toward the day ahead, thoughts absorbed by the invisible threads of a functioning life.

The cinematography encloses both Michal and the viewer in the suffocating hum of a morning commute. The world gleams like a warning no one heeds, and the air thickens with heat. By the time Michal arrives at work, the facade of his mirror-walled office building glows like sauna stones, foretelling the catastrophe that has already begun. Occupied by meetings, phone calls, and broken A/C, seemingly nothing is catastrophically wrong. But somewhere in that blinding brightness, the world fractures. Domi was left in the backseat to roast beneath the same sun that glitters across the city’s surface.

The tone sinks into anguish. Michal’s reality warps, and the edges of memory twist like asphalt in the afternoon sunshine. The long takes, which captured the rhythm of a family morning, now stretch time until it feels unbearable. Nvotová doesn’t shy away from torturing her protagonists while the camera lingers on Michal’s and Zuzka's bodies and minds collapsing inward. Their emotion borders on dull insanity, a liminal state between grief and numbness. Memory becomes both evidence and punishment as the narrative gradually moves towards courtroom testimonies and psychological evaluations.

What emerges is not a story about negligence, but about the unbearable fragility of memory and how one thoughtless moment can unmake an entire world. Nvotová’s gaze doesn’t moralise, but rather observes the mechanics of guilt with the patience of someone staring into the sun. As Michal spirals deeper into grief, he is left with the barricades his mind creates to protect his heart from fully breaking. But even when the worst day of your life is over, the air is still heavy, and some things are impossible to forget. Father feels like a heatstroke, the kind that doesn’t fade when the sun sets. Distraction is the most ordinary form of danger, and forgetting, no matter how human, may be the cruelest act of all.

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