My grandpa lives in a nursing home, just around the corner from the bungalow he had spent the previous 22 years of his life in – most of them with his wife, until she passed away in March 2022 from cancer. While our family had suspected memory problems for a long time, it wasn’t until her death that he started to really decline, and two years after her funeral, the decision was made to find him a place in a care unit as he was housebound and injuring himself nightly. Now he’s in a home, and the staff are very nice, and he is safe and happy even though he largely has no idea who anyone is or what he’s doing there. Sometimes, when my mum visits, he’ll ask her, “Will you come visit again?” or “When am I going home?”
This period has been so hard and painful for my family I don’t fully know how to talk about it with people unless they have been through it too. A few know that my grandpa had to move into a home because of his dementia, and they know I’ve been sad about it. Fewer still have heard me say the awful thing that no loved one of a dementia patient is meant to say out loud: it would be easier if he was dead, wouldn’t it?
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I’ve written about films that tackle dementia in the past – my great-grandma had it too, and in the final stages of my grandma’s cancer she had steroid psychosis, which has similar symptoms. I think a lot about my potential genetic predisposition towards the condition, and I joke with my mum (who feels much the same way) that I’d take just about anything over slowly losing who I am. It’s a horrendously cruel illness for all involved, and a remarkably common one: 1 in 9 people over the age of 65 has Alzheimer’s (the cause of between 60 – 70% of dementia cases). Yet despite the devastating impact of dementia and the reality being that most of us will either be diagnosed with it or care for someone who is in our lifetime, the conversations around treatment, care and quality of life are mostly had in hushed voices, through bitten lips, as though it’s a foregone conclusion that people with dementia tough out indignity before they finally pass away.
Sarah Friedland, a New York-based filmmaker and artist, was inspired to make her feature fiction debut after losing her grandmother (who had lived with dementia for many years) and working as a caregiver for artists with memory loss. Through her work, she noticed the difficulty that many have in coping with dementia, be it in preemptively mourning loved ones (something I am guilty of) or in ascribing to dementia patients a rigid identity to which they must confirm (often the role of helpless child-like patient). The film centres on Ruth (Kathleen Chalfant), an octogenarian living in Brooklyn, who is moved into a nursing facility by her son Steve (H. Jon Benjamin) and must adapt to a new lifestyle after decades of fierce independence.
Without a score to fall back on, the emotional core of Friedland’s film comes from Chalfant’s masterful performance. We are with her every step of the way, listening to the steady drawer of her breath, watching as she methodically prepares ingredients for a recipe. Ruth finds comfort in routines (as many dementia patients do) and when she boldly wanders into the home’s kitchen and begins serving as a line cook, the staff are befuddled, but Ruth is briefly her old self, talking about her former life as a cook (not a chef, she insists). The glimpses we gain of her old life are sparse and intriguing, but Familiar Touch does not rely on the audience learning facts about the protagonist to create empathy. Instead, the film is – as the title might suggest – powered by the senses, often employing a static camera that is content to watch as Ruth and her fellow patients go about their days.
Where a film like Florian Zeller’s The Father – a sublime film in its own right – employs more classical “cinematic” techniques to depict the disorientating experience of being a dementia patient, Friedland is restrained, with a sparse, near plotless script, and a cast of precious few characters (Carolyn Michelle Smith plays Vanessa, a sweet and patient care assistant, while Andy McQueen is Brian, the facility doctor). Arguably this makes Familiar Touch all the more remarkable; there is great emotional heft to a relatively simple film, and a dignity and empathy afforded to dementia patients (or indeed anyone living in a care facility) that feels astonishingly rare on-screen, where sensationalism tends to bring the house down. But with Gabe C. Elder’s bright, light-filled cinematography and Eli Cohn’s evocative sound design, one becomes startingly aware of the incredible importance of our physical bodies, once our minds begin to fray. There is beauty in the mundane here; a shopping list, written by hand; scrambled eggs, served in the shape of a smiley face; floating gently in a swimming pool, remembering a day some 70 years in the past.
In another Venice 2024 prize-winner, The Room Next Door, Pedro Almodóvar ponders the concept of a “good death” making a stirring case for the legalisation of euthanasia. It makes for an interesting companion piece to a film like Familiar Touch, which lacks any sort of melodramatic flourish. Both works call for a more open attitude to the end of life, and what it means to love someone who you are actively losing. I’m not afraid to die, but I am afraid to lose who I am in the process, and while that is something I will have to perhaps face in the future, I am hopeful that films like Friedland’s can continue to widen our collective understanding of what makes us so uncomfortable about the process of growing old, and how we can navigate a world that is inhospitable to anyone no longer deemed “productive” by the capitalist hellscape we’re living in. There are no empty assurances here; no platitudes or infantilisation of the elderly. Familiar Touch feels radical in its quiet honesty, and breathtaking in its dignified compassion.
