Anyone who has spent time with someone suffering from dementia has seen a loved one lie to them. These are not lies of malice; they are lies of convenience. Trying to tell someone whose brain neurons are dying why they are where they are and why you are doing what you are doing is a difficult task made all the more frustrating by the fact that the dementia patient won’t remember. Isn’t it just easier to say something that will put their mind at ease and allow everyone to move on unbothered?
The frequency, ease and acceptance with which people lie to dementia sufferers makes them perhaps the most dehumanized members of our society, so perhaps it is not surprising that it has taken until now that a film, Sarah Friedland’s Familiar Touch, as promising a debut as the American cinema has given us in many years, reckons with the disease’s parallel atrophies — of the memory of one party on one hand, and of the humanity of those around them on the other.
For ethical reasons, nobody receiving living assistance for dementia appears in the fictional Familiar Touch, but Friedland, who worked for a time caring for artists with dementia, shot much of the film in a Pasadena, California, facility and worked closely with staff and patients during production. At the start of the film, we meet Ruth (venerable stage actress Kathleen Chalfant), home alone and preparing lunch in Friedland’s thoughtfully lit compositions. But when a man we eventually discern is her son comes to visit, we quickly see that Ruth’s facilities are leaving her (particularly when she fails to recall the name of her son, Steve). Benjamin’s performance is intentionally stilted, even mechanical, and Friedland wisely relegates him to a disembodied voice for a good chunk of the encounter, a decision that both dehumanizes and empowers him. When he lies to Ruth about where they are going and takes her to the assisted living facility, Friedland loosens her grip slightly: we get a moment to watch Ruth, incapable of understanding, talk to Steve and a nurse, and it’s immediately apparent why Steve took the approach he did.
Most of the rest of the film takes place in the facility and documents Ruth’s efforts to adapt. She can’t distinguish the dining hall from a restaurant, but later she takes control of the kitchen and we see that the years spent working in food have imprinted a comfort and excellence in the environment that has you wondering if she’s well enough to be a worker rather than a patient. Elsewhere, she can’t quite understand why she must talk to a doctor, and her insistence on reciting a borscht recipe from memory, impressive as it is, only underscores the necessity of treatment. Still, the performances, naturalistically capturing the performance of the nurses and the varying mental states of the patients, make this a more hospitable home than even what opened the film, even with Friedland’s attuned inserts of the everyday.
This tension, between the frequently necessary infringements on individual freedom and the social harm of continued autonomy, animates this middle section of Familiar Touch in a remarkably even-keeled manner — disciplined in the recognition of how framing, performance, and scenario color tone, but languid, even effortless, in appearance. Compelling subject matter aside, Familiar Touch astounds also for how Friedland, alongside DP Gabe Elder and editors Kate Abernathy and Aacharee Ungsriwong (who edited on 2016’s underseen By The Time It Gets Dark) make each shot feel like part of a carefully storyboarded sequence (whether or not that is the case). Much of the American independent cinema of the last two decades can trace its lineage to Cassavetes, but Familiar Touch is on its own track.
As the film approaches its dramatic and then emotional climax, it refines rather than underlines, complicating its lucid humanity where a lesser film would opt to repeat its points or litigate its themes within the drama itself. Crucial to the dehumanization of the dementia-addled, however, is the prescriptive manner in which they are discussed and treated, the generalization of how the disease manifests in different patients, and the rush with which society attempts to move the difficulties out of sight. Familiar Touch challenges us not to look away, and it does so — precisely because it embraces rather than rejects the complexity and nuance generally denied its subject — with the moral right that more explicitly political films can only aspire to.
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