Emotional, painful, frustrating journey.The story of a woman who is put in a home after she develops Alzheimer's Disease, how her and her husband cope with with this, and how their relationship is affected.Very sensitively told, making for a very emotional movie. Maybe too sensitively done: the film moves incredibly slowly. Every scene is drawn out to breaking point. Plus there are some incredibly frustrating turns of events, which add to the irritation.However, the level of engagement with the characters is high enough for you to sit through it all. It's not a perfect movie, far from it - for the reasons mentioned above and the lack of a punchy or profound ending - but is watchable and endurable.

Based on an Alice Munro short story, "Away From Her" is an excellent drama by actress turned director Sarah Polley. The film was produced by Atom Egoyan, Polley's director in both "Exotica" and "The Sweet Hereafter". Aesthetically, "Away From Her" resembles Egoyan's own early work.The plot? Gordon Pinsent plays Grant Anderson, a husband whose wife, Fiona (Julie Christie), begins to suffer from Alzheimer's disease. As her memory loss worsens, Grant moves Fiona into a nursing home. Here Fiona both forgets her own husband, and falls in love with another patient. Grant believes Fiona to be faking her illness as a form of punishment – he cheated on her with several younger women – but Fiona insists otherwise. She praises Grant for his faithfulness, for sticking with a marriage that could have collapsed, adulation which Grant feels is unwarranted.At its best, "Away From Her" touches upon the creepy fragility of the human brain, the fickle nature of memory, love, identity and sanity, and the often arbitrary ways in which relationships, romances and whole subjective personalities are forged and dissolve. All it took for Fiona to forget a lifetime was a minor neural glitch, and all it took for Grant to forget Fiona was a moment of lust. In "Away From Her", whole personal histories are but source code ripe for deletion. "Away From Her" ends with Grant "giving up" Fiona to another man, an act which Polley invites her audience to contemplate. Is this an act of love, of altruism, of selfishness? Is Grant attempting to preserve his idealised memories of Fiona, or simply allowing the memory wiped woman to move on? Actors turned directors often coax special performances out of other actors. In "Away From Her", Polley gets excellent performances out of Pinsent and Christie. The former's a reserved man whose immobility belies deep undercurrents and whose face – forlorn, kind but with wicked eyes - looks like it was torn from an Ingmar Bergman movie. Christie's even better; graceful, beautiful, and called upon to skitter from sanity to confusion to the clear-eyed confidence of a madwoman. Christie herself suffers from a Transient Epileptic Amnesia, a disease which causes recurring episodes of sharp memory loss. "Away From Her" was scored by Jonathan Goldsmith, whose effective score is superseded by a single moment of diegetic sound. This moment occurs when a mentally ill patient periodically strikes piano keys, a haunting sound which powerfully coincides with a particular on-screen revelation. Aesthetically, "Away From Her" is simply directed. We can forgive this; it was Polley's debut. 8.5/10 – Excellent. See the highbrow "Cries and Whispers" and the lowbrow "Remember Sunday".

Sarah Polley's directorial debut is an impressive one. Mostly, she was successful in picking great actors. Grant Anderson (Gordon Pinsent) is suffering as his wife Fiona (Julie Christie) slowly loses her memories. She has Alzheimer's disease and gets placed in a long term care facility.The whole movie takes place on the face of Gordon Pinsent. His pain is evident every time she can't remember him. It is truly heartbreaking. Julie Christie delivers one of her greatest performances. She doesn't overact. The confusion isn't theatrical which could so easily taken as comical. It is a quiet suffering on the scraggly old face of Pinsent. The one out of step moment is the passing old man who comments that Grant's heart is breaking into a thousand pieces. It's too obvious and too on the nose.There is something about veteran actors taking all their life experiences and putting it on the screen. It's something that can't be faked. And it can't be done with younger actors. We saw a man breaking right in front of us on the screen.

Away From Her could very well be the first suspicion riddled; identity orientated thriller revolving around paranoia, as well as that indelible sense of threat a lead often has in those sorts of films, that is born out of someone being diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, that there's ever been. Such a statement will make the film sound cheap and nasty or exploitative; on the contrary, it is an immensely astute and really rather mature piece of work. If there is this sense at various times throughout Away From Her that the film strikes us as thriller-like, complete with the aforementioned characteristics of paranoia and distrust with those whom the word 'distrust' should never even register, then it is because of a remarkable cut-and-thrust atmosphere the film has throughout in its depiction of a person's world unravelling and everyone within it only appearing to turn against them.Indeed, the film will begin in the present before going back in time for its depiction of certain proceedings - starting with the elderly male lead in Grant Anderson (Pinsent) visiting someone initially suspicious of this man before having them turn into one of the very few allies our lead Grant appears to have left. There is a sense of the lead travelling here, and then residing here, as a specific story is told which is actually more broadly linked to the newfound ally's own tragic back-story than one would think. Grant speaks to this newfound friend, and the general atmosphere as things progress and we start to understand things a little more has it feel like someone is hiding out at a safe-house whilst recounting recent tales of people, whom they operated with for many years, veering away from them. With snow on the ground outside as far as the eye can see and this sense of shifting norms within specific patriarchies as immense changes unravel in a person's life prominent, the whole thing is made to sound like a political thriller. As the tale is recounted, we observe both suspicion and paranoia taking over Grant's life as plates shift and new orders kick in; the ambiance in the adjacent room a sports commentary continually speaking of a contest in which the duelling between two fighting sides is apparent.The depiction of how Grant came to be at this stage is what follows; the man having been more than happily married to a certain Fiona (Christie) for a great-many number of years and himself now serving as a retired university lecturer. This in mind, we deduce that Grant cannot be too much of a slouch in regards to certain academic and logical standards, whilst the revealing that his career subject was that of history puts across a sense that the man has always had a firm eye on the past – a professional standard which will now spill over into more personal realms. The pair appear to be in a decent state of matrimony, the couple skirting through what appears to be a pre-laid track through the snow in this, the nether regions of snowy Ontario, Canada, inferring a metaphorical reading from the same page and epitomising this blissful occupying of the same plains.The opening stock footage of a grainy Fiona in her younger years, and of which infers a kind of 'memory' aesthetic, appears far more prominent when it is revealed older Fiona at this time is loosing her more immediate memory – an item of such ugliness and frank sensitivity that it is initially introduced through a juxtaposition with a photogenic yellow flower designed to spark off a pleasant memory that she can no longer recall. It is further established Fiona's functioning mind may very well be deteriorating when a logical theoretical exercise proposed to her by a doctor about a fire inside of a cinema isn't answered particularly diligently; the film doing well to distract us from the situation with a later diegetic 'jab' between the two on screen characters at the American film industry, this being a Canadian independent.From these dangerous foundations comes Fiona's moving into a care home at the discretion of Grant, the catch being he is not allowed to see her for a period of several weeks by which time it is feared she will have forgotten him. Out of this, an impressive and highly involving tale is spun which manages to capture the tragedy of the situation alongside a particular tone of positivity or upliftingess; a sense that if this newfound scenario is what's best for her, then so be it. In a sense, the film is about letting go and about recognising times past and trying to move on – one might read the film into being about states of grieving and yet nobody has died; the element of death a slow, ongoing process of memory loss resulting in the premature distancing of one person to another. The film makes for fascinating viewing and the director is a certain Sarah Polley, a Canadian actress here taking up the directorial reigns for the first time while creating a very precise, rather ambitious, drama which hits the right notes.