Familiar Touch is Sarah Friedland’s gruesomely poignant feature debut, about a woman going into care because she’s old and losing her mind. Depending on your age it’s about people in your generation, or your parents’ or grandparents’. But no matter how far removed you feel from the events on screen, there’s a very good chance the same will happen to you. And that’s if you’re lucky.
We first meet Ruth (Kathleen Chalfant) at home making herself some lunch. Something on toast with a few herbs scattered on top, which Ruth snips from pots on the windowsill. She seems alert, capable and content. Her life appears to be orderly and OK. Then a younger man arrives, Steve (H Jon Benjamin). The two of them talk for a while, just chatting about everyday stuff. Suddenly two things become apparent, like depth charges going off. One is that Steve is Ruth’s son, though she seems unaware of the fact. The second is that this is the day he is taking her to a care home, and she’s not coming back home again.
This incredibly moving film could stop right there and you’d probably already feel heartbroken. This blameless woman’s sunny kitchen has soon been replaced with a functional room in an institutionally decorated care home full of oldies, some shuffling about like zombies, others reasonably capable, all just killing time until time kills them.
Friedland shot the film in a working care home, using members of staff as extras and crew. That might explain why the whole thing has a dreadful matter-of-factness to it. Much as Ruth does, we meet and get to know key members of staff. Like Brian (Andy McQueen), the kindly doctor Ruth cheerfully tries to convince she’s compos mentis. As she gives him chapter and verse on how to make the best borscht, Brian listens patiently, obviously completely familiar with performative displays of capability. “I’m not one of those elderly people you have to watch constantly,” Ruth tells Vanessa (Carolyn Michelle), a care assistant, later on.
Insistent that she doesn’t have dementia, Ruth is bemused when she discovers she’s on a floor the residents nickname Memory Lane.
Chalfant has been acting for decades, quite often playing authority figures, aunts and judges, roles which demand a kindly gravitas. There is plenty on display here, in a performance that is so convincing that it’s a jolt looking at the publicity shots of a bright and breezy Chalfant out promoting the film.
There is a lot of forbearance in this movie, which treats its subjects with respect and the care home system as one where things pretty much just roll along. It could have joined the ranks of quasi-horror movies about elder abuse but it hasn’t, though the steady routine of pills, food and jolly activities designed to keep the inmates engaged has a certain grim aspect to it.
In long, often quite static shots, Friedland lets us soak up the internal hierarchies – the able bodied see the home almost as a hotel, and behave as if they were guests rather than prisoners. We get the oddness too. At night, with funny lights on in the semi-darkened corridors and strange creatures drifting along them, there is a science fiction quality to the place. It’s an alien landscape.
This is death before death. Steve clears out his mother’s home, though she is still alive and is fairly certain she’ll soon be coming home. Ruth is smilingly determined not to accept her decline and the staff are largely playing along. Is it admirable, or stupid, or is this all part of dementia too? And what’s the alternative?
We don’t learn much about Steve’s take on all this, but that would probably be a distraction. I was gripped, horribly, by this amazingly compassionate film. I’ve never seen anything like it before, though the obvious comparison is Michael Haneke’s Amour and Gaspar Noë’s Vortex, both of which charted decline with a pitiless gaze. There is more pity here, much more. Haneke and Noë’s films horrified me; Familiar Touch made me feel very, very sad.
Familiar Touch – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
