Father: Review by Saba Osanadze

The Unbearable Weight of Memory

A harrowing, tender portrait of guilt and survival, Father turns an unthinkable mistake into a study of how memory can both destroy and redeem.

By Saba Osanadze

Tereza Nvotová’s Father (Otec, 2025) refuses to let the audience look away from human frailty. Having premiered in Venice’s Orizzonti section, this Slovak-Czech-Polish co-production is a humane portrait of guilt, love, and the impossibility of self-forgiveness. With her third feature, Nvotová portrays a sensitive chronicle of internal collapse – and Milan Ondrík delivers a performance so raw it’s difficult to separate the actor from the man he plays.

The story revolves around Michal (Ondrík), a seemingly ordinary father and husband whose life is shattered by an almost inconceivable mistake. When he later discovers what happened, the realization detonates his world like a silent bomb. From that moment, Father ceases to be about an event; it becomes about everything that follows – the corrosive guilt, the social judgment, and the slow disintegration of a man who can no longer trust his own mind.

Nvotová approaches the material not as melodrama or sensational tragedy, but as psychological study. The camera stays close to Michal’s face, often refusing to cut away from his confusion or numbness. The film is filled with long takes that make the viewer feel complicit in the man’s psyche. It’s a stylistic choice that mirrors the claustrophobia of trauma: the more Michal tries to move on, the more the walls of memory close in. Ondrík’s performance anchors the film – his body language alone conveys the erosion of a soul. His voice, hesitant and fragile, carries the tremor of someone who no longer knows how to exist among others.

Dominika Morávková, as Michal’s estranged wife Zuzka, gives the story its moral counterweight. Her grief is less visible but no less consuming. Nvotová wisely avoids turning her into an antagonist; instead, she represents a different form of endurance. The kind that must coexist with the man who caused her loss. Their shared scenes are some of the film’s most painful: two people bound by love and tragedy, incapable of comfort.

Father favors a muted, naturalistic palette. Cinematographer Dušan Husár bathes the image in pale blues and greys, suggesting both emotional paralysis and the ghostly persistence of memory. The score, used sparingly, echoes faintly like a memory trying to resurface.

What makes Father so devastating is its refusal to offer redemption. There is no cathartic confession, no external forgiveness to balance the scales. The tragedy has already happened; what remains is the unbearable task of living afterward. By the final scene, when Michal quietly returns to his daily routine, the audience realizes that survival itself is the film’s bleak miracle.

In its emotional honesty and restraint, Father stands as haunting work – a film that stares into the heart of human error and finds not answers, but the fragile dignity of trying to go on.

Director: Tereza Nvotová
Writer: Dusan Budzak, Tereza Nvotová
Cast: Milan Ondrík, Dominika Moravkova, Anna Geislerová
Running Time: 102 minutes
Country: Slovakia, Czech Republic, Poland
Year: 2025

©FIPRESCI 2025