When producer Matthew Thurm ’10, was asked if he wanted to share a few words before the screening of his newest film, “Familiar Touch,” he chose to echo the film’s director, Sarah Friedland: “Films should be prefaced as little as possible.” So, with that in mind, I settled into one of the comfy red chairs in the Ping and Rose Chen screening room, knowing little except that the film I was about to see would feature a patient with Alzheimer’s disease. Given the success of Florian Zeller’s “The Father” (2020), I expected this production to follow the same path: a film designed to befuddle its audience and overwhelm them with emotion, immersing them in the confusion and terror of the disease. “Familiar Touch” is anything but that.
The film follows Ruth (Kathleen Chalfant), a woman in her eighties, as she navigates the early stages of her Alzheimer’s diagnosis. At first, nothing seems amiss: she dresses herself, cooks with ease and remarkable skill, and lives what seems to be a comfortable life in her sun-soaked Californian home. That illusion shatters with the arrival of her son, Steve, whom Ruth mistakes for a suitor whisking her off on a date — only to learn he’s taking her to Bella Vista, an assisted-living facility.
In many ways, “Familiar Touch” resists the impulse to explain Alzheimer’s disease. The film never signals its audience to brace for tragedy, stopping itself short of saying, “Watch this, it’s about to get really bad, really fast.” Instead, the film opts to assume the quiet perspective of an observer. Friedland’s camera sits still, watching Ruth with a gentle patience so that even as her lapses become explicitly clear (the most touching of which I believe to be the gorgeous sequence where Ruth imagines herself back in a restaurant kitchen as she helps prepare breakfast for the senior residents), the film refuses to frame these as dramatic turns. Alternatively, the camera lingers on these moments rather than cutting away from them. Friedland positions her audience as observers, allowing us to dwell on Ruth’s pauses, her hesitations, and her returns to mundane routine. The film trusts its viewer to notice and feel, without being told what to feel. The cinematography is deliberate, grounded, and deeply humane, allowing ordinary moments — a long-held gaze, the light touch of a hand, the sterile hum of a purple fluorescent bulb — to take on emotional weight. Where so many films about dementia aim for catharsis, Friedland and Thurm offer something quieter and, perhaps, more unsettling: acceptance.
During the post-screening Q&A, Thurm joked about the recent wave of “dementia dramas,” stating that he preferred to think of “Familiar Touch” as an “Alzheimer’s action flick” before landing on a more earnest label: a “coming-of-old-age film.” In other words, he and Friedland imagine the film as a story that maps the stages of one’s adolescence onto their old age. If adolescence is a time when identity blurs and reforms, when boundaries between self and others soften or sharpen, then Thurm suggests that old age can be its mirror image. Ruth moves through moments on screen that echo the awkwardness and vulnerability of youth, only here, the uncertainty stems not from who she will become, but who she has been.
This idea comes to fruition in one of the film’s final scenes: a dance at a birthday party for the “March babies” of the Bella Vista. Underscored by the only needle drop in an otherwise musicless film, Thurm invites us as viewers to see this scene as a perhaps not-so-stereotypical prom scene. Dionne Warwick’s “Don’t Make Me Over” drifts softly through the room as Ruth’s son invites her to dance. The camera alternates between their faces — Ruth’s lit with glee as she experiences, perhaps for the first time she can remember, her romantic ideal of being asked to dance by a boy; Steve’s stricken with a heartwrenching frown as he accepts that, as long as she remembers him as a suitor, he will never again be able to play the role of her son.
Then, just as the film gives its audience a minute to breathe or shed a single solitary tear at what could have been the ending, Friedland cuts sharply back to reality. In the next sequence, Ruth’s decline is unmistakable: her physical autonomy has diminished, and even simple tasks like dressing herself now require assistance. The transition is jarring, but intentional. “Familiar Touch” posits that the boundary between the tenderness of memory and the harsh truth of the present is far more fragile than we might wish to admit.
In this contrast, “Familiar Touch” finds its emotional core. The film asks its viewers to appreciate the strange beauty in surrendering to what is left when memory fades. In this way, Friedland and Thurm honor their own guiding principle — that films, or rather the fleeting moments all around us that they capture, should be prefaced as little as possible.
Familiar Touch has been nominated for two Gotham Awards (Best Feature and Breakthrough Director) and is now streaming on Mubi.com.
