FAMILIAR TOUCH is the deeply affecting directorial debut from Sarah Friedland featuring a stunning award-winning perfomrnace from Kathleen Chalfant (OLD). Chalfant plays Ruth - an old woman suffering from dementia - and the movie centres her experience as she leaves her own house and moves into a dementia-care facility. The performance is stunning because Ruth moves between moments of apparent clarity and her old sassiness and moments of bewilderment. We learn about her situation as she discovers it - the gentle realisation that Steve (H Jon Benjamin - ARCHER) is actually her son, and that she had actually toured and approved moving into the facility some week's prior. We watch Ruth amused by the memory games her nurse plays with her, and part of the film's sadness is knowing that while she thinks she's figuring it out, she doesn't really know what's going on. We watch her ask for a menu as if she's at a restaurant rather than in a nursing home, and later try to relive her life as a chef, cooking in the kitchen and even attempting to buy groceries. So much of the joy of this gentle, patient, film is just spending time with Chalfant's Ruth. Perhaps as befits her theatre background, she has an ability to infuse melody and clarity into the simplest sentences. There's a real poetry and magic in how she lists different foods in her recipes. And a melancholy in knowing that while these evocative lists are what she can still remember, she no longer recognises her son. This is a unique and beautiful film, and it's delightful to see that a performance like this can beat out contenders from bigger, better marketed and distributed films. It's really worth seeking out.
FAMILIAR TOUCH has a running time of 90 minutes. It played Venice and London 2024 and was released in the USA last summer. Chalfant recently won the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actress.
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