Film

Away from Her

Away from Her is Sarah Polley's remarkable directorial debut, adapting Alice Munro's story about a husband and wife of nearly fifty years confronting Alzheimer's. Gordon Pinsent and Julie Christie underplay everything, which makes the small cruelties land harder. It's quiet, literary, unhurried — more interested in the specific ache of being forgotten by someone still alive than in melodrama. For anyone drawn to patient, adult films about marriage, memory and the limits of love.

TMDb rating7.0

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Iris2001

Judi Dench and Jim Broadbent trace novelist Iris Murdoch's mind dissolving, cutting between her fierce younger self and the woman disappearing before her husband's eyes — a companion piece in every sense.

But The dual-timeline structure can feel schematic, and it leans harder into sentiment than Polley's film ever allows itself.

Iris poster

Amour2012

Haneke strips away every comfort in this unflinching study of an elderly Parisian couple after the wife suffers a stroke; devotion here is shown as duty, not romance.

But It's punishing and offers almost no relief — some viewers find its clinical distance closer to endurance than catharsis.

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The Father2020

Anthony Hopkins delivers dementia from the inside: rooms rearrange, faces swap, time loops. It's formally daring where most films about memory loss stay safely external.

But The disorientation is deliberate and relentless — if you want calm, this will exhaust rather than soothe you.

The Father poster

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Make Way for Tomorrow1937

Same central wound as Away From Her: a devoted marriage pulled apart not by choice but by circumstance, with no rescue in sight and no false reunion at the end.

Leo McCarey's Depression-era drama about an elderly couple separated and shuffled between their children's households is so bleak Orson Welles claimed it could make a stone cry. It did this story first, and unsparingly.

But It's a 1930s black-and-white melodrama with none of Munro's restraint — broader, more openly tearful, and structurally simpler.

Make Way for Tomorrow poster
More like this (8)

Still Alice2014

Julianne Moore won an Oscar playing a linguistics professor losing language and self to early-onset Alzheimer's — precise and articulate about exactly what's being lost.

But It's more conventional and cleanly plotted than Away From Her, with a tidier emotional arc than the disease it depicts.

Still Alice poster

45 Years2015

Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay play a couple whose decades-long marriage is upended just before their anniversary by a single unresolved piece of the past.

But No illness here — the threat is memory and secrecy, not disease, so it's a slower emotional match than a literal one.

45 Years poster

Supernova2020no page yet

Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci play a couple confronting early-onset dementia on a last road trip together — tender, unshowy, quietly devastating.

But It sometimes reaches for prettiness the material doesn't need, softening edges Away From Her leaves sharp.

The Savages2007

Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman play adult siblings forced to place their estranged, ailing father in care — funnier, angrier, and more selfish about caregiving than most films dare.

But The tone shifts between comedy and grief more abruptly than Polley's steady hand, which some will find tonally jarring.

The Savages poster

On Golden Pond1981no page yet

Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn play a long-married couple facing mortality at their summer lake house — warmer and funnier, a portrait of a marriage's late chapter.

But It's gentler and more resolved than anything in Away From Her — no illness, no real threat, mostly reconciliation.

The Notebook2004

The framing device — an old man reading their love story to his wife, who no longer remembers it — is the same idea Away From Her handles, just dialed up into full melodrama.

But It's unapologetically sentimental and swoony where Polley's film is restrained; if that restraint is what moved you, this will feel like the opposite instinct.

The Notebook poster

Robot & Frank2012

Both ask what's left of a person once memory starts going, and both care more about dignity and companionship than diagnosis — just wearing wildly different genre clothes.

A cranky retired jewel thief with early dementia is given a caretaker robot he reluctantly trains as an accomplice — light sci-fi that sneaks real grief about memory and independence in under cover of comedy.

But It's genuinely funny and gadget-y, a tonal 180 from Polley's hushed drama — some will find the sci-fi premise trivializes what Away From Her treats with total seriousness.

Robot & Frank poster

Alive Inside2014no page yet

Away From Her is fiction built from close observation of what dementia takes; this is the nonfiction version, showing real patients and families living the same slow disappearance — and occasional flickers of return.

A documentary following a social worker who gives iPods loaded with personal favourites to nursing-home residents with dementia — the footage of buried memory and personality flooding back through music is startling and real.

But It's advocacy filmmaking, a little rough and repetitive structurally, and its hopefulness sits at odds with the quieter fatalism of Polley's film.

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