Gotham Awards Revue: "Familiar Touch"
Monday, November 3, 2025 at 9:30AM by Nick Taylor
First, let me express how happy I am that, at least from my filmgoing corner, the Gotham nominations have encouraged more people to watch some of their lower-profile selections. The number of folks I’ve seen log Familiar Touch and Lurker and East of Wall on Letterboxd this past week has been extremely heartening. Hell, I never would’ve prioritized Familiar Touch without Nick Davis’s glowing review, I finally got our own Cláudio Alves to watch it last night, and now everyone who’s going to see it after today will obviously have done so because of me, so trust the power of good word-of-mouth reception! If anything I should have had Sarah Friedland’s film on my radar after she won the Someone to Watch award at the most recent Indie Spirits. Oh, and the three prizes the film won in the Orizzonti selection of last year’s Venice Film Festival.
Friedland’s clearly got a great pedigree even before factoring in the Best Feature and Breakthrough Director nominations from the Gothams. Luckily for those of us who’ve caught up to Familiar Touch, this adulation is fully deserved, and the crafty, intelligent film is proof enough of her talent . . . .
Familiar Touch follows Ruth (Kathleen Chalfant), an octogenarian widow living alone in what looks like a very lovely home. She’s a thoughtful, present figure, and in the scant moments we see of her skillfully preparing a meal and dressing herself for a lunch date, she seems able to take care of herself just fine. Friedland doesn’t allow us too deeply into Ruth’s thought processes, using negative space and mirrors to immediately signal a woman who isn’t fully accessible to the audience without suggesting a blankness or lack of interiority. We are encouraged to actively see Ruth as a human being containing multitudes we cannot fully access. As she welcomes her bespectacled guest, Steve (H. John Benjamin), and quizzes him about his life over their meal, we quickly intuit this man to be her son through his attentions and discomforts. Ruth, meanwhile, treats him like a colleague and boldly flirts despite acknowledging both of them are married to other people.
There’s something more to their upcoming trip than Steve’s been able to say out loud, which is why he can barely eat, and Ruth is too excited for the mystery to make him spoil it. They drive to their destination, and from the decor of the building’s lobby, it looks like they’re at a fairly upscale hotel, until Ruth is greeted by a woman in nursing scrubs named Vanessa (Carolyn Michelle Smith), who welcomes her to Bella Vista, an assisted living facility that’s now her forever home. In fact, Ruth has been here before and personally made the decision to be moved should her mental decline require her to have additional care. Her life is irrevocably changed in mere moments, yet she’s more vociferously disbelieving at being told Steve is her son.
Is she embarrassed, possibly due to her earlier forwardness, or betrayed by this sudden transition in living situation? Or is Ruth stunned to realize this has happened to her, that she helped make this happen, and had no living notion about it? Friedland and Chalfant never tell us, allowing us to consider what it’s like in Ruth’s shoes by keeping us out of her head, forcing us to speculate and imagine what she’s thinking and feeling even when she might not know the answer to. Everything about this woman’s demeanor, her clothes, her home, suggests a self-consciously sharp personality, someone who’s fundamentally caught off guard by how much of herself has slipped from her grasp when she wasn’t looking.
As writer and director, Friedland has created an unusually fleshed-out portrait of the earliest stages of dementia, much more of a feat of cinematically rendering behaviors and attitudes than dialogue. Even if you don’t know Friedland’s extensive past work as a dancer and choreographer, or as a staff member in an elder care facility before you go into Familiar Touch (and now you do!), her filmmaking techniques observe and inhabit Ruth’s mental state with real sensitivity. There’s a welcome emphasis on filming actors in medium and wide shots, such that even when someone is alone in the frame, their body language is still integral to communicating characterization. Dilations of time within and between scenes change unexpectedly but never carelessly. Cutaways to Ruth’s caregivers are often impressive for what they convey about those individuals as well as what they withhold about her condition in scenes ostensibly designed to deliver this information. Close-ups are judiciously deployed, and never to the effect of isolating someone from their body or their environment.
The fluidity of Ruth’s personality, not just in her moment-to-moment lucidity but in how she understands her age, her occupation, her surroundings, and her relationships to the people around her is handled with dexterous care. The variations of cheeriness, propriety, conspiratorial friendships, sexual desire, and amusement register as evidence of a present, crackling mind, but also as reflex behaviors to carry her through an interaction she doesn’t fully grasp the dynamics of. Her oft-displayed skill as a cook, how it manifests as a source of comfort and a reliable path for personal expression, is a fabulous detail threaded throughout the film. These gestures hint at the person Ruth likely was before dementia took hold, flashes of history defined by negative space, forcing the audience to wonder who this woman was in her prime and just how much of her has already been lost.
I’m also quite taken with the wardrobe put together for her by costume designer Nan Zhou. She arguably has to provide Familiar Touch with the most concrete indicators of who this woman was through repeated cuts, colors, and fabric choices, while still serving its thesis about freestanding personalities, and she does an excellent job of it. Zhou gifts Ruth with a recognizable style while leaving us to wonder what impression she hopes to make with her black jacket, her gold watch, her red-and-white striped button-up. The other residents of Bella Vista are dressed with comparable grace, and the flashes of personality in Vanessa’s purple scrubs and Brian’s dapper sweaters are very appreciated.
The end-credits acknowledgment of collaboration with the residents and staff of Villa Gardens Continuing Care Retirement Community is an intriguing retroactive pall on Familiar Touch’s portrait of the Bella Vista facility, which reads as authentic without ever being faux-documentarian in how it presents character and incident. If anything, the elements I question most are the ones calling the facility’s competency into question for the sake of narrative activity. A late-in-the-game “revelation” about Ruth’s treatment is hard to roll with, largely because it’s presented as a lapse on the part of her caregivers. Following this testy, honest conversation, I simply don’t believe any reality where Vanessa would let Ruth walk away from Bella Vista for the sake of a trite “Where are you going?” “Home.” call and response. It’s a story beat I have a hard time rolling with, albeit one I can still productively accept if only for how perfect Chalfant is at performing this epiphany.
In fact, Kathleen Chalfant is perfect across every beat of Familiar Touch in one of the year’s very best performances. As grateful as I am to the Gotham Awards for nominating this film, I have no fucking idea how their committees would be able to acknowledge it anywhere without also putting Chalfant in their Lead Performance lineup. She’s utterly synchronized to Friedland’s ambitious presentation of mental decline and scattered personhood within a fairly sharp woman, as well as the cinematic grammars Familiar Touch uses to forward our understanding of Ruth. Chalfant’s physical carriage from scene to scene, the way she holds her head or looks someone in the eye, is just magnificent, communicating as much as her line readings about how Ruth sees herself or wants to be seen by others at any given moment. I love how she enters a kitchen she’s never been in as though she’s worked the line for years, or the absolute serenity she communicates floating in a pool, quietly asking for another minute to float. She even confounds our sense of how “well” Ruth is doing in her two showcase scenes with her doctor
Chalfant and Friedland never once present dementia as blank-faced docility or cheap hysterics. Instead, they show us Ruth as a prismatic array of personality traits, life experience, coping mechanisms, and reflexive behaviors. Even as she rotates amongst selves or grasps at her reality with slippery hands, Chalfant ensures Ruth is always engaged with her surroundings and responsive to others. She’s not always inhabiting the same truth as her caregivers, but that’s not the same as being disconnected from them.
If I have spent a longer-than-expected amount of time detailing the film’s specific ambitions before hyping up the actressy enticement at its center, it’s all in service of the fact that Chalfant is indispensable in putting these ideas forward. I can’t confidently say whether she’s elevated any particular aspect of Friedland’s project or if she’s simply the perfect accomplice to those aims, but the result either way is the same. Chalfant’s baseline of emotional legibility and psychological opacity could not be better-tailored to what Familiar Touch needs, and I can’t imagine it reaching this level of adulation without her bravery and insight. Who’s to say if Chalfant’s even a little bit interested in getting awards for this magisterial turn, but at the very least she deserves something akin to the run of critical attention Mary Kay Place received for Diane. Hell, why be modest - give her the whole Oscar.
Familiar Touch has been nominated for Best Feature and Breakthrough Director at this year's Gotham Awards. It is currently on MUBI, and can be bought or rented on most major streaming platforms.
Reader Comments (3)
I admit I'm not very familiar with Kathleen Chalfant- I haven't seen any films she was in except for Kinsey and I don't remember her being in it. However I immediately recognized her face from the many episodes of Law and Order I have watched over the years. It is nice for a "in the trenches" actor to finally get the movie/role/acclaim that they deserve after years of work.
TomG -- She's mostly known as a stage actor, really a legend at this point. She played the Meryl parts in the original productions of ANGELS IN AMERICA, and also originated the role of Vivian in WIT. I wonder if she would be a Tony winner, had that Pulitzer-winning play premiered on Broadway rather than Off-Broadway.
Nick -- Beautiful review. I especially loved your description of Ruth as "someone who’s fundamentally caught off guard by how much of herself has slipped from her grasp when she wasn’t looking."
I watched FAMILIAR TOUCH yesterday, right after A LITTLE PRAYER, and it made for a striking comparison between beautifully written American indies with a formidable, yet smartly unshowy, lead performance by a veteran thespian. Only, putting one beside the other evidences what makes Friedland's direction so special, how aware and careful she is with the framing of the performances and the spaces her characters inhabit. It's not especially spectacular in execution, but motivated and intelligent, unlike the peculiar shallow depth of field and odd cutting patterns of the other movie, where scenes that feel like they'd be better in one single take united by a pan are broken apart in almost identical shots with only slight angle variations. It's the difference between a talented dramatist and director of actors understanding the specificities of cinema as a medium versus someone who's not nearly as confident in the matters of image-making for the big screen. Honestly, it made me appreciate those Gotham nominations all the more.