Sarah Friedland’s Familiar Touch is a moving feature film debut that rewards the viewer’s patience with a humane portrait of ageing, memory, and autonomy. Set almost entirely in the contained world of Bella Vista, an assisted-care home, it paints an unsentimental but not unhopeful picture of an elderly woman’s induction into what she comes to realise are the last years of her life.

H. Jon Benjamin and Kathleen Chalfant in Familiar Touch

Broadway star Kathleen Chalfant is Ruth, an elegant octogenarian and skilled cook navigating the slow drift between choice and circumstance. We meet her in her kitchen, methodically making lunch for a visitor, Steve (H. Jon Benjamin). During their halting conversation, it becomes apparent that Ruth has memory issues. The man she so gently flirts with is actually her son.

She is also unaware that this is the day Steve is taking her to Bella Vista. She arrives under the impression that it is some kind of hotel.

Friedland’s direction invites us into Ruth’s world through eloquent command of framing, camera height, pace, and sound. We are made to share in her hesitations and moments of uncertainty. Seemingly mundane activities serve as reminders of competence and dignity, even as memory and identity blur.

Kathleen Chalfant and Carolyn Michelle Smith in Familiar Touch

Films that focus on the elderly, even the well-intentioned ones, can sometimes condescend or sentimentalise. Familiar Touch does neither. Instead, it absorbs the viewer in the shifting moods and minutiae of Ruth’s relationships with her main caregivers, Vanessa (Carolyn Michelle Smith) and Brian (Andy McQueen), and in her struggle to maintain a sense of independence.

An interesting sidenote: to make the film, Friedland set up a workshop at a care facility in Pasadena and had residents make their own biographical films as part of the project. After everyone had been immersed in the experience, some were cast in the feature.

Familiar Touch is gently paced, and some might find its minimal narrative drive too lulling. The pacing perfectly mirrors the reality of Ruth’s world, however — the looping routines and subtle repetitions of her institutional life; the soft physical touches and watchful glances. Gabe C. Elder’s cinematography is similarly restrained yet frequently beautiful.

And at the centre of it all is Chalfant — graceful and clever, sometimes occasionally prickly and rebellious. Every scene, every close-up, is suffused with feeling. The moments in which she grasps her plight are moving, as are the moments in which she gracefully accepts the inevitable.

Familiar Touch screens in cinemas nationally from 23 October.