Where Do Lilacs Come From
2014 · 12m · Australia
Directed by Matthew Thorne
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Chris, an old man suffering from Alzheimer's, is confined to his house; his son, Michael, is his main caregiver, and during months, Chris's mind has been fading and with it his understanding of reality, as he desperately tries to hold on to his mind.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Okay, so it's a sensitive portrait of cognitive decline—which sounds like every PBS documentary ever made, except Thorne resists the urge to wring sentiment out of it, and that refusal is almost perverse enough to be interesting.
A formally restrained meditation on loss that trusts the viewer's patience; the editing mirrors Chris's fractured cognition without ever becoming mannered, and the film's lineage—the quiet dignity of Koreeda, the spatial precision of late-career Haneke—proves the work knows exactly what tradition it's honoring.
The film lives or dies on the son's performance, and Thorne gets something devastating from the long takes of Michael watching his father—not performing care, but the exhausted micro-expressions of someone holding on to their own sense of self while witnessing its dissolution in someone else.