Tallinn 2025 Review: FATHER, Immersive and Visceral Psychological Study of Guilt and Grief

Slovak award-winning filmmaker Tereza Nvotová tackles a serious real-life case in her latest feature-length film, Father.

Based on a 2015 incident in which a father forgot his two-year-old daughter in a car on a hot summer day, Nvotová penned the script in collaboration with Dušan Budzak, a friend of the father who wrote a book about their relationship. Father adopts the perspective of the titular character, capturing his psychological and emotional unravelling in an intimate, intense, and harrowing experience.

A single moment divides Michal’s life into before and after. Played by Milan Ondrík, he is a loving husband and devoted parent whose accidental act breaks his family and exposes him to intense public scrutiny. The film unfolds in long, unbroken takes that immerse viewers in the rhythms of guilt, grief, and the slow realization of irreversible consequence. Michal oscillates between emotional stasis and tentative attempts at reconciliation with his wife and with himself.

Nvotová’s filmmaking again aligns narrative precision with formal exploration. Her previous works, Filthy  and Nightsiren, examined trauma, gender, and forms of societal repression through intimate vantage points often embedded in broader structures of institutional failure or folkloric tension.

Filthy, a psychological portrait of a teenage rape survivor, navigated shame and silence through a conventionally framed but carefully observed coming-of-age story. Nightsiren expanded her visual approach through genre elements and allegorical storytelling to investigate inherited fears in a rural setting.

With Father, Nvotová returns to psychological realism, narrowing her stylistic approach to a rigorously composed observational form. The film’s sustained, uncut sequences merge performance and cinematography into a continuous perceptual space. Working with cinematographer Adam Suzin, she employs a fluid camera that follows Michal at close proximity.

While the method recalls the Dardenne brothers, Nvotová uses it not for stylistic signaling but to remove any mediated distance between character and viewer. The result is a psychological immersion that moves rapidly from a banal moment through tragedy to collapse. By minimizing narrative editing, the film requires viewers to remain with Michal as his internal world deteriorates and the external world strips him of stability.

This approach reshaped the creative process. Editor Nikodem Chabior was present on set, functioning less as a post-production assembler and more as an active observer of rhythm in real time. Composer Pjoni worked similarly, shaping and adjusting cues on location so the music grows out of the scenes rather than being placed over them later. Sound and score operate as extensions of Michal’s fluctuating inner state rather than as emotional signals.

Father is neither a true-crime drama nor a reconstruction of the tragedy. It is a psychological study that places emphasis on aftermath rather than on incident, and avoids sensational framing. Nvotová has spoken about her intention to resist the tabloid treatment that surrounded the real case. The film instead attends to the fragmented and frequently nonverbal dimensions of human response and depicts how personal tragedy becomes distorted once mediated and public.

Ondrík’s central performance is intentionally contained. Rather than foregrounding visible emotion, he inhabits Michal’s dissociation with physical precision, allowing ruptures to surface irregularly. He traverses a wide emotional spectrum, from professional strain and subtle arrogance in early scenes, through shock, collapse, delusion, and eventually a fragile attempt at re-entry into damaged normalcy. His presence grounds the film.

Dominika Morávková, the lead in Filthy, stars as Michal’s wife Zuzka. Her character is equally marked by grief although not by guilt, and Nvotová guides both performers through dissociative states that verge on the surreal as the couple approaches psychological breaking points. Morávková, however, feels misaligned with Ondrík’s screen presence, and the mismatch goes beyond the age difference. By contrast, Aňa Geislerová (Caravan), who appears as Michal’s former wife at the court hearing,  is a much better fit for the character than Morávková, especially since Morávková needs to unearth a series of uncomfortable, outwardly alienating, and searing inner states in the corrosive, nightmarish turmoil the character goes through.

Nvotová’s earlier films centered female protagonists navigating systems of institutional or mythological pressure. Father shifts this orientation but maintains her interest in the space between private suffering and its social context. While Filthy and Nightsiren externalized trauma through social or genre-coded structures, Father internalizes it, focusing on the cognitive patterning of guilt and the psychology of moral failure. Nvotová has referred to the film as a love story only in the sense that it charts the endurance of love amid the erosion of identity.

What sets Father apart in Nvotová’s filmography is its radical formal unity. The director’s choice to minimize montage, restrict exposition, and rely on rehearsed mise-en-scène indicates a movement toward cinematic minimalism. Yet unlike works of formal austerity that prize abstraction, Father remains anchored in lived emotional experience. A psychological impasse becomes the film’s central motif.

As in her previous work, Nvotová investigates the structures that shape human behavior, whether social, interpersonal, or epistemological. Father extends this inquiry through its formal constraints and its attention to internal rupture. The film largely avoids melodramatic territory, even though one scene approaches its edge before steering back.

Father engages with guilt and masculinity at the thematic level, yet Nvotová refrains from situating it within explicit ideological frameworks. The film offers a visceral viewing experience, though in a more contained register than this year’s most physically affective work, Sirāt.

Father is Slovakia’s submission for the 2026 Academy Award for Best International Feature Film.