Familiar Touch and Ruth's borscht

Recapping one of the best movies of 2025

I put off seeing Familiar Touch for ages—even after it won Best Actress and Best Director at Venice in 2024, screened in New Directors/New Films at Lincoln Center and MoMA in March, and had a theatrical run at Film Forum in June. I couldn’t summon the emotional fortitude for a film about an elegant older woman with dementia moving into assisted living, but finally did so from the comforts of my own home while playing catch up last month. (You can stream Family Touch in the US and Canada on MUBI with 30 days free at mubi.com/elissa.)

I kid you not: Sarah Friedland’s coming-of-old-age movie is nothing like the ordeal I imagined. H. Jon Benjamin plays the son, and the whole thing is executed with remarkable grace and warmth. It sneaks up on you in the gentlest, loveliest way.

In the opening scenes, our protagonist Ruth is still at home, keeping faith with the rituals of her former life, rummaging through her closet and choosing an outfit. She moves into the kitchen (immaculate, unmistakably California) and begins to assemble. Toast pops. Herbs are clipped from potted plants. Friedland keeps the camera still, observing her from a middle distance. Close-ups, in general, are rare in the film. I might dub this a soft surveillance, both tender and forensic, of someone who’s beginning to slip…

Soon, from above, we see the completed dish, a lox sandwich, plated with deliberation. Ruth has a guest—Benjamin’s character—and during their light, slightly stilted conversation, she rests a hand on his leg and his eyes widen in response. He brushes the gestures off and we understand immediately that he is not her husband. She, however, is flattered by his concern (“How are you sleeping?”) and giddily anticipates that small surprise that she’s told will follow this pleasant little meal.

There is a surprise, just not the one she imagines. Today is the day Ruth moves into the nursing home.

The film becomes a series of vignettes as Ruth acclimates to her new environment—weekly doctor visits, arts and crafts, and pool time. Friedland observes this next chapter with enormous empathy, as Ruth takes in the surroundings with dignity, reticent but trying. In the lead role, Kathleen Chalfant, a stage actress who won the Tony for Angels in America, delivers a performance of exquisite, tremulous detail. Throughout, the upper part of her face dances through the emotions like a mime.

Dementia in Familiar Touch isn’t screeching fits or grotesque delirium of forgotten details, none of Uncle Junior’s panic at seeing “himself” on Curb Your Enthusiasm. It is smaller than that—an almost imperceptible reshuffling of the mind’s index cards. Ruth does wander away from the facility grounds, but it’s less a fugue than a reactionary escape from duress brought on by speed dating. Like being at a party that isn’t going your way, she simply decides to leave.

What remains when you begin to lose yourself? What stays lodged in the body after the mind starts to fray? Ruth’s memory might be spotty on a given day, but her knife skills are ferociously intact. One morning, instinct overrides circumstances. She walks into the staff kitchen still in her pajamas, but with a towel slung effortlessly over her shoulder like she’s done this many times before. She halves a cantaloupe and supremes grapefruit with a surgeon’s calm. It’s the first time we see her entirely coherent, the muscle memory of a former life moving through her hands. The empathetic and well-trained staff simply let her be—she isn’t causing any harm anyway. Soon she’s plated all of the residents’ breakfasts with upright triangles of toast and precise little dots of ketchup and hot sauce.

The power of food memories appears even in a scene without any food at all: Ruth makes a shopping list, then asks her nurse/aide to do the same. She reads each ingredient aloud, lingering over the words the way some people read cookbooks before bed, slowly and savoring. The potential deliciousness becomes its own kind of balm, a comfort drawn entirely from memory or the hope of future pleasure.

We never find out what Ruth used to do beforehand, career-wise. Friedland astutely keeps things in the present. When someone calls her a chef, she corrects them humbly, but with pride, that she is merely a cook. She learned by watching her mother, like so many of us have. When Ruth first arrives at the facility, she recites her borscht recipe from memory to a doctor with startling force. The last line is the one that lands: “Taste, adjust, taste, adjust.” It’s meant for the pot, but it works just as well as a survival strategy—how she holds onto herself, one minor correction at a time.

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RUTH’S RECIPE FOR BORSCHT

Take potatoes and beets and slice very thinly. Boil in water until tender. Save the water.

Meanwhile, take two yellow onions. Chop them. Cook them in butter.

When they sizzle, add a pinch of caraway seeds, just a pinch, and some salt, of course.

When you can see through the onions, put in one carrot, one stick of celery, and half a head of cabbage, thinly chopped.

You put that water you saved from the potatoes and beets over those vegetables.

Boil until tender. Then you add the potatoes and beets.

Now you’ll want to add stewed tomatoes and vinegar. Most people use apple cider, but I like to mix red wine and balsamic for taste.

Then there’s black pepper, honey, fresh dill. Save some fresh dill to put on top later.

Put a top over that, simmer for 30 minutes. Then you taste, adjust, taste, adjust. Add sour cream.