'The Father': Seeing the World Through the Lens of Limitation

The narrative style of the film “The Father” is unique—it’s told entirely from the first-person perspective of a father with Alzheimer’s disease, presenting those chaotic, fragmented, temporally scrambled memory slices directly before our eyes. The audience, along with the protagonist, becomes trapped in the vortex of time.

This film reminded me of my own home. At school, if someone gets angry, I can coolly say: “OK, what does it have to do with me?” But back home, in an environment where someone is upset from time to time, staying calm becomes very difficult—especially on days when overeating leads to indigestion and low spirits.

But looking back now, those former troubles seem to have changed flavor. Like during New Year, everyone gathered together, laughingly imitating the easily-angered mom teaching us in dialect that “getting angry is just consuming yourself.” Moments like that, thinking back, are actually quite fun.

Perhaps we don’t cherish what we have because we haven’t yet tasted loss.

Murakami wrote in “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running”: “Running longer than usual distances, letting the body consume more, to recognize from the deepest level that oneself is a limited, weak human being—to physically understand this.”

Whether it’s the cognitive limitations brought by Alzheimer’s, the emotional limitations in family relationships, or the physical limitations felt while running—all remind us that our abilities are finite.

I think that when we try to see the world through the lens of “limitation,” we might actually gain different, unexpected rewards.