“A film with an interesting gaze, but a distancing experience that is more an intellectual dissection instead of having the audience draw easy parallels to our own situation in a time when subtlety should perhaps be sacrificed with subject matter like this.”

At a time when authoritarianism is on the rise everywhere, it’s good to remember that history has shown us that it can come to nothing again. That process, or at least the last stages of it, is the subject of Portuguese director José Filipe Costa’s political satire Our Father – The Last Days of a Dictator, about the final days of António de Oliveira Salazar, who ruled Portugal as a dictator between 1932 and 1968. Incredibly more or less a true story, the film turns Salazar into a pathetic figure who hangs onto a power that is no longer there, as his ailing mind slings him through ever-increasing hallucinations and nightmares, while those in the close circle around him keep up the pretense that he is still in control. Hovering between a serious chamber drama and an absurdist impression of the death of a fascist, Our Father is a film that will please history buffs and those that need comforting in these dark times alike, even if the film does little to deepen Salazar as a character and is more focused on his entourage.

It’s 1968, and António de Oliveira Salazar (Jorge Mota), who has ruled Portugal for almost four decades, has taken a nasty fall that is keeping him cloistered in his state residence, Palacete de São Bento. His trusted maid Maria (Catarina Avelar) and a trio of servants (Vera Barreto, Cleia Almeida, and Carolina Amaral) are the only people he sees, outside of the occasional doctor or visiting politician. They all keep a harsh truth hidden from him: he is no longer the country’s ruler. As his health and especially his mind deteriorates, each of the players around him reflects on their relationship to a man who ruled Portugal with an iron fist, but was also in a way dear to them.

The film’s approach to its subject matter feels like a mixture of Albert Serra’s The Death of Louis XIV and Jayro Bustamante’s La Llorona, both films mostly focused on the peripheral figures circling an ailing authoritarian in their midst. From the latter it also borrows the haunting supernatural elements in the form of Salazar’s hallucinations, which often involve animals and show both animal and human alike with demonic red eyes. The meaning of these scenes is harder to grasp, other than showing the deterioration of Salazar’s faculties, but they do emphasize the darkness that lies over his soul and perhaps the return of a political system to its animalistic nature when control is slipping through its fingers. In lucid moments Salazar seems preoccupied with Portugal’s colonies of Mozambique and Angola, mostly to underline him being the leader of a colonialist regime. Too many vagaries mar the characterization of the old dictator, as if broad strokes are sufficient to paint him as a bad man. Not so subtle swipes are taken, almost literally, at the Portuguese press too, when one of the servants uses a newspaper to swat at a fly, one of the clear metaphors in a film that sometimes gets lost in its tendency to become too broad a comment on fascist systems and loses sight of the specificity of its story.

The strokes get finer when it comes to the dynamic between Salazar and Maria, his historical long-time maid and the true heart of the film. As a woman who cherishes her relationship to this once-powerful man, his decline is also hers, a fact that she struggles with and takes out on her chorus of servants, with Barreto’s character, the most prominent of the three girls, taking the brunt of the abuse. Maria, and to some extent Barreto’s character, bear witness to the toxicity and the allure of strongmen like Salazar, with infatuation leading to cruelty or a need to excuse the behavior of those admired from afar or up close. These elements of Our Father are clearest and most poignant specifically because of their broad applicability as well as their focus on the historical figures in the film.

Filipe Costa’s satirical political drama is given more stature by its exquisite production design and costuming, and a sound design that shows its strengths in Salazar’s fever dreams. Taken altogether, they make Our Father a well-crafted portrait of the last days of a fascist regime, something we’d like to cling to these days to keep our hopes up, although the film could have been a more powerful statement if it were more concise and to the point. What we are left with is a film with an interesting gaze, but a distancing experience that is more an intellectual dissection instead of having the audience draw easy parallels to our own situation in a time when subtlety should perhaps be sacrificed with subject matter like this.