‘Familiar Touch’ takes audiences gently into that good night

“Familiar Touch” — 3.5 stars

An elderly woman rises, gets dressed and makes breakfast in a well-appointed kitchen. With a chef’s precision, she fries the eggs, chops onions and parsley, takes a piece of toast and leaves it on the dish-drying rack. A stranger arrives, a man whose name she doesn’t know, and she serves him the meal. The stranger is her son, and today she’s being taken to memory care in an assisted-living facility.

Because we live in a culture that obsessively worships youth, movies about old age are few. Yet more of them seem to be arriving as the baby boom generation starts to disappear over the horizon. Brutal truth-tellers like “Amour” (2012) and “The Father” (2021) with Anthony Hopkins, a joyous comedy like “Thelma” (2024). Of these films, Sarah Friedland’s “Familiar Touch” may be the gentlest and most mysterious, presenting the narrowing days of a woman’s life as a kind of lucid dreaming — a stepping backward into a child’s sensations and then further, into an amniotic state of simply being.

Patient, observant and slow, “Familiar Touch” benefits immeasurably from the presence of Kathleen Chalfant as the woman, Ruth Goldman. A New York stage actress, Chalfant has made few film appearances, but her Broadway performances in Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” and as the cancer patient in Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Wit” are legendary, and this movie’s director and we are lucky to have her. Chalfant gives her role the rich specificity of a woman you know — a friend’s mother or grandmother, say — and she’s able to evoke an entire life history with a gesture or a look.

So her Ruth is elegant with a core of street wisdom. What we learn of her is piecemeal: born and raised in Brooklyn (and often thinks she’s still there); a life in restaurant kitchens — “I’m a cook, not a chef,” she brusquely insists. Somehow, she ended up well-off on the West Coast. Her dementia is a cause for baffled wonderment more than for fear or agitation, although she tells Vanessa (Carolyn Michelle), her primary caregiver at Bella Vista, “I’m not one of those elderly people you have to watch all the time,” and she unloads detailed instructions for making borscht onto Vanessa’s boss Brian (Andy McQueen), saying, “Could someone who has you-know-what tell you that recipe?”

In the closed, kind world Friedland gives us, Vanessa and Brian are indulgent with Ruth, treating her with attention, respect, caution and humor. “Familiar Touch” sees all sides of their lives, too — we eavesdrop on conversations about unionizing and about elderly relatives who can’t afford a “geriatric country club” like Bella Vista. The film quietly acknowledges issues of race and class when Ruth offers to set up Vanessa, who’s Black, with her brother, who’s “active in the civil rights protests.” Yet connection rather than division is the watchword, and a scene or two later, Vanessa is brought to tears when Ruth’s reading of a recipe’s ingredients reminds her of her own mother.

“Familiar Touch” is told in images that linger and at a pace that pauses to take in the world around Ruth; it shares her amazement at the wrinkled tissue of her skin or the chip clip in a woman’s hair. (An end credit informs us that the film was shot in collaboration with the residents and staff of Villa Gardens continuing care retirement community in Pasadena, California.) There’s no musical score to steer our emotions, and in that hush, each moment becomes precious, as if (and because) it will be lost to Ruth’s memory within minutes.

There’s an indelible sadness to all this, of course — I don’t know that I’ve seen a more moving scene this year than Ruth in the shower, suddenly remembering her son’s name and then weeping with the knowledge that it will be gone. But there’s also a tranquility to the film that’s a benediction — a sense of giving oneself back to the universe in all its enormity.

Our society treats aging like a curse never to be mentioned instead of the inevitability it is, but Friedland’s film (and Chalfant’s meticulous performance) challenges us to see it head-on. Some may not be up to the challenge. “Familiar Touch” will probably stymie viewers who like their films moving with appointed speed, and I imagine audiences in the bloom of youth will shrink from it in horror. Yet others may see themselves in the character of the son, Steve (H. Jon Benjamin) — a middle-aged architect and a good man — who serves as the film’s anchor of sorrow, concern and deep, abiding love.

A personal note: The critic has recently returned from a school reunion where his classmates, weathered and no longer young, compared notes on looking after parents in their 90s, parents with dementia, parents with bones as brittle as tinder. The love and care I heard in their voices permeates “Familiar Touch,” enough for me to want to recommend the film to them and to anyone in the same big boat, watching our mothers and fathers fade into the night while feeling the breeze on the back of our own necks. To be here is blessing enough, whether we remember it or not.

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At the Siskel Film Center in Chicago. Unrated but contains intimations of mortality. 91 minutes.