Fading Away
2025 · 10m
Directed by Francis Han, Yimiko
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
An irascible elderly man, Mr. Harrington, resists the young care worker assigned to replace his previous aide, until a small act of kindness, and the loss of a beloved vinyl record, forces both men to renegotiate what care and memory mean.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a grief story dressed as a care-worker dramedy, which is exactly the kind of thing everyone expects to be moving and safe — and yet Han and Yimiko seem genuinely uninterested in earning the sentiment, which is almost refreshing, almost frustrating, almost right.
The film situates itself squarely in the lineage of chamber dramas about memory and mortality, and executes that lineage with formal precision: the vinyl record becomes a perfectly calibrated symbol, the intergenerational tension resolves through a logic both earned and literary.
The film lives or dies on the moment where Mr. Harrington's resistance collapses — not through dialogue, but through what the cinematography chooses to show of his face — and Han and Yimiko commit entirely to that single undefended instant, which transforms a familiar premise into something that actually breathes.
Reviews
A moment of such kindness between Jack and him that it seems to undo years of bitterness. In eight words, the film contains the whole dilemma of good intentions and fundamental distance.