This article appeared in the April 4, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Familiar Touch (Sarah Friedland, 2024)

Nursing homes occupy a peculiar place in our collective imagination. Narrowly identified as sterile surroundings where people bide their time being infantilized or ignored while waiting to die, these sites are likely to inspire existential dread even in the fortunate few who’ve never consciously considered their own mortality. The homes’ presentational facades, marked by cheerful lighting and healthy greenery, invite their own kind of morbid fixation; in The Savages (2007), Philip Seymour Hoffman, playing the son of an Alzheimer’s patient, assures his sister (Laura Linney) that it’s all a ploy to assuage the guilt of family members who get to leave, and distract them from the truth about what happens behind closed doors: “People are dying, Wendy! Right inside that beautiful building right now, it’s a fucking horror show! And all this wellness propaganda, and the landscaping, it’s just there to obscure the miserable fact that people die! And death is gaseous and gruesome, and it’s filled with shit and piss and rotten stink!”

That’s essentially the bleak perspective that mainstream movies uphold without mitigation—all “facility” and no “care.” On screen, Nurse Ratched–style bureaucrats and attendants at their breaking points vastly outnumber the dedicated, humane caregivers I’ve often observed as a visitor or pet-therapy volunteer. Sometimes the concept of the eldercare center as death’s holding cell is literalized by horror films in which patients are threatened by sinister forces stalking the halls at night, like The Rule of Jenny Pen, released in theaters last month, or the 2002 black-comedy/thriller hybrid Bubba Ho-Tep. In such portrayals, however far-fetched, geriatric residents are left to their own devices when facing death, paid no mind by overworked or apathetic staff. That very real fear of abandonment lies at the heart of our ingrained resistance to these dwellings, stoked in no small way by everything visual media has shown us over the years.

How refreshing, then, when a film bypasses the lurid and the exploitative, and concentrates on the actual emotional labor of acclimating from an autonomous living situation to a controlled one. Last year’s Thelma pitted the preconceptions of its titular heroine (June Squibb) against the pragmatic belief of her old friend Ben (Richard Roundtree) that people with diminished faculties are better off in environments where they receive proper nourishment and mental stimulation (Ben is playing Daddy Warbucks in a charmingly superannuated production of Annie). Never trivializing the difficulties of surrendering the bulk of one’s freedom to join a community based on mutual need, the film (despite a lighthearted heist plot that strains plausibility) belongs to a recent string of works that explore the realities of that adjustment with unembellished truth and compassion.

Familiar Touch, the first feature by multimedia artist and choreographer Sarah Friedland (and the Opening Night selection of this year’s New Directors/New Films festival), sensitively charts the adaptation to assisted living of Ruth (Kathleen Chalfant), a self-possessed, octogenarian former professional cook with dementia, who insists she is “not one of those elderly people you have to watch constantly.” She is brought to her new home by her son, Steve (H. Jon Benjamin), whom she seems to regard initially as a gentleman caller taking her on a surprise outing. Friedland’s screenplay delicately aligns us with Ruth by denying us narrative certainty; thus, we’re unsure how fully she grasps the reality of her circumstances at first, and whether she feels betrayed or believes her taciturn but plainly agonized son’s claim that she chose the location herself in more lucid times. In any case, she sends him away, asserting that she wants him to be “unconcerned” for her.

One is immediately struck by the cliché-avoidant restraint of Friedland’s approach. Rather than milking facile emotion from tawdry tight shots and a manipulative score, she and cinematographer Gabe C. Elder observe Ruth from a respectful distance with infrequent and carefully judged close-ups, permitting our responses to derive from scenes’ contents and not their accoutrements; the resulting emotion is much more acute for having been earned. In a shattering early exchange, Ruth shares her detailed recipe for borscht with physician Brian (Andy McQueen), proudly proclaiming that no senile person could possess her recall, then rattling off pertinent autobiographical facts until she can no longer hold back tears. One cringes at the bathetic potential of such a scene, but Friedland’s dignified framing and Chalfant’s masterful control keep mawkishness at bay; it’s no surprise that the pair won awards for Best Director and Actress in the Horizons section of the Venice Film Festival last September. In another moment so understated that inattentive viewers might miss it, Ruth experiences a flash of clarity in the shower, remembering that Steve is her son; then she notes with chagrin that she’ll soon forget his relationship to her.

One extraordinary sequence unexpectedly reminded me of Terrence Malick, but with more terrestrial concerns. Ruth goes to the window of her room, at least two or three stories off the ground, and appears to eavesdrop on a private conversation below, between Brian and kindhearted nurse Vanessa (Carolyn Michelle), two of the many brown and Black caregivers at the facility. Brian notes that his own grandmother wouldn’t want to live in such an opulent setting, and couldn’t afford to do so, anyway; Vanessa laughs in agreement. The likelihood that Ruth could hear this brief exchange that was not meant for her ears, let alone understand what was being discussed, is minimal; like the young boy roaming the lawns of his neighborhood in The Tree of Life (2011), bearing confused witness to adult quarrels indoors, Ruth is our unknowing conduit, granting us access to perspectives outside her own.

Chalfant is a stalwart of the New York stage who played a half-dozen roles in the first Broadway run of Angels in America, in 1993; over the past decade I’ve been privileged to see her bring to life a gallery of vivid characters. One show I was sorry to miss was For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday, in which she literally took flight on stage as J.M. Barrie’s age-defying Lost Boy (or, rather, an elderly woman awash in memories of playing the role as a stagestruck teenager). But something of that temporal elasticity informs her performance as Ruth, who retains ties to her past self through her unfailing prowess in the kitchen, encouraged by the home’s benevolent staff members. Even as her cerebral resources fade away, she remains able to connect with others and express herself in culinary terms.

Friedland notably took a break from the film industry to serve as a companion to artists in cognitive decline, telling Filmmaker Magazine in 2023, “I became fascinated by the slipperiness of age identity, and these experiences convinced me to make a coming-of-age film for an older woman who is experiencing the major transformations of moving into a care facility, experiencing a shift in memory and yet finding a continuity of self.” This led her to Villa Gardens Continuing Care Retirement Community in Pasadena, where she ran a moviemaking workshop for residents of the independent and assisted-living wings, many of whom appear on screen alongside Chalfant. The venue’s cooperation should not, however, suggest that Familiar Touch is an informercial for Villa Gardens (called Bella Vista in the film), or a false rendering of life there. Despite its occupational and hydrotherapy perks and friendly, non-patronizing staff, it is still a nursing home. When Ruth asks for a menu in the dining room, she is informed, not unkindly, that it doesn’t work like that.

As a graduate student, I wrote a thesis on depictions of old age in American cinema, and watching Familiar Touch reminded me of the key takeaway from my research: that senior-citizen and teen dramas have almost everything in common. Both involve individuals struggling to be seen, heard, and taken seriously by the generation in power; both find their protagonists clinging to fragile identities as outside forces try to suppress them (or at least give the impression of doing so). Adolescent angst differs from the twilight kind only in the widespread belief that it’s transient, and for that reason alone it’s more palatable. Friedland clearly grasps the correspondence, as evidenced by her description of the new work as a “coming-of-age film.” Authenticity, neither cheapened by eliding unpleasantness nor sensationalized by wallowing in it, is the hallmark of her technique, and with Familiar Touch, she comes of age as an artist.

Steven Mears is the copy editor for Film Comment and Field of Vision’s online journal Field Notes, and is a contributing writer to both. His work has also appeared in Metrograph’s Journal, Bloodvine, Galerie, and other publications.