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‘Familiar Touch’ Review: An Exquisite Study of Living With Dementia That Puts Its Perspective In the Right Place
Sarah Friedland's 'Familiar Touch' is a precise, funny and acutely moving portrait of a woman adjusting to assisted living.
As viewers will have surmised some time before Ruth (an extraordinary Kathleen Chalfant), she’s being checked into Bella Vista, an upscale assisted living facility not far from her bright, happily storied, memento-filled home in suburban Los Angeles, though it may as well be another world entirely. Premiering in Venice’s Orizzonti sidebar — with a raft of festival appointments set to follow, and likely much distributor interest too — “Familiar Touch” is the latest in a recent surge of films, from “The Father” to “Relic” to “Dick Johnson is Dead,” to address the challenges and trauma of living with dementia. As Ruth finds her bearings in Bella Vista, “Familiar Touch” begins to take on the contours of a fish-out-of-water story from an earlier stage of life — as if it’s a new school where the social rules haven’t been defined for her, and she can’t yet identify her allies from a daunting array of unfamiliar faces.
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