The Phantom Father makes the portrait of a man’s chimera, scared by his own mortality and the approaching old age, while still-hunted by his childhood phantoms. 
The confusion of the middle age crisis experienced by “the dreamer” Robert Traum permeates the whole narrative structure which is based on an extended misinterpretation: of the age, geographical, cultural and linguistic. 

The rhythm of the film is similar to a tango, always balancing between the New World and the Old one, childhood and maturity, fairytale and thriller, fiction and reality, love and threat, arduous search and evading responsibility, banal and supernatural.

Quid-pro-quo is the main compositional technique and the characters are not confused solely by their own identity, but also by the others’; the overweight and violent mayor is mistaken, in the midnight hour, for the seraphic Tanya, the American professor is confused with a dangerous CIA agent, the old projectionist battles with Ukrainian mobsters who set aside any seriousness required by their profession and become fast food vendors, and the passing visitor is believed to be a serious future son-in-law and is married without understanding a word of all the solemn stuff that happens.

The Phantom Father is neither a genre film nor a certain kind of film; it is a road movie fusion with cherry on top, a film in which the final destination is actually the journey, turned into an exquisite dessert. It is highly recommended to the lovers of fiction – a corpulent, friendly and tender story tale to be served in large sizes.