Sunday 21 September 2025, 3:30 pm
Rainbow Cinemas, Northumberland Mall
Synopsis
A sensitive coming-of-old-age film that follows an older woman's transition into assisted living as she navigates her relationship with herself, her caregivers, and her family amidst her shifting memories and desires.
Writer-director Sarah Friedland's coming-of-old-age feature compassionately follows the winding path of octogenarian Ruth's shifting memories and desires while remaining rooted in her sage perspective.
Directed by: Sarah Friedland
Writer: Sarah Friedland
Cast: Kathleen Chalfant, Carolyn Michelle Smith, Andy McQueen, H. Jon Benjamin
Genre: Drama
Language: English
Run time: 81 minutes
Review
By Kevin Filipski
Rarely has the subject of dementia been explored with such delicacy and insight as in Sarah Friedland's feature debut, about an octogenarian, Ruth (Kathleen Chalfant), who is taken to an assisted care facility by her son, Steve (H. Jon Benjamin).
Friedland opens the film with Ruth, poised and elegantly dressed in her well-appointed home, making sandwiches for an upcoming visitor. When Steve arrives, she speaks to him as if he's someone she's just met and is getting to know—almost as if it were a first date and not her adult son who has given her a granddaughter. When he later takes her to a facility named Bella Vista, he leaves her with Vanessa (Carolyn Michelle), who becomes her primary caregiver. Ruth doesn't notice that he's gone.
What's touching and heart-tugging about Familiar Touch is how, well, familiar things become for Ruth in the facility. It's less that she's taken with her new surroundings than that her memories of her lovely home and family are largely gone—so she accepts her new reality, in a place filled with others like her, at face value.
Of course—and this is what gives the drama its rich substance—Ruth's memories aren't always absent. Her lifetime of culinary expertise (she was a cook) hasn't fully abandoned her. When she matter-of-factly tells Brian (Andy McQueen), the health and wellness director, her recipe for borscht, she paints such a succulent picture of a dish she's made countless times that he can't help but be moved. Later, she wanders into Bella Vista's kitchen and starts making breakfast for Vanessa. The cook and his assistant quickly realize they should humor her and allow it, giving Ruth a fleeting moment of triumph.
Friedland balances these quiet moments of inner joy with the harsh reality of Ruth's condition, including difficult-to-watch scenes of her slipping further into dementia—such as when she walks out of the facility one evening and enters a grocery store to buy ingredients for a meal, only to realize she has no money.
There's also a painful scene when Steve returns to visit her. She greets him as a stranger, and from his reaction, it's clear he's used to it. He plays along. Then, frustrated, he gets up and awkwardly dances by himself to the Burt Bacharach and Hal David song “Don't Make Me Over,” and asks Ruth for her hand. She joins him, and they dance slowly—an achingly tender, if brief, moment of connection for both of them, even as he sadly knows that his mother has no idea he is her son.
Friedland's heartbreaking film is filled with sensitive grace notes like this, and Kathleen Chalfant gives an extraordinary, vivid portrayal of Ruth—a woman who, even in the waning stages of lucidity, remains exuberantly alive.