Still Alice review: Heartbreak as a life’s stolen away

It tackles a difficult subject with sensitivity and features a performance of quiet dignity and restraint from Julianne Moore that fully justifies her Best Actress Oscar win last month. Alice Howland (Moore) is a world-renowned linguistics professor with a passion for communication.

Her professional standing makes it all the more poignant when she starts to forget her words and lose her bearings. Something is clearly wrong.

She suspects a brain tumour but when she learns the true diagnosis, she says: “I wish I had cancer. I wouldn’t feel so ashamed.” Alice at just 50 has early onset Alzheimer’s.

Her deterioration will be rapid and there is also a chance she might have passed the gene on to one or all of her three children Anna (Kate Bosworth), Tom (Hunter Parrish) and Lydia (Kristen Stewart).

The film charts Alice’s period of living and struggling with an illness that starts to steal parts of her personality. It is as if an oil painting is slowly wiped clean.

Co-directors Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer keep the film simple and straightforward, cutting to the core of the matter without the need to tug at the heartstrings.

We probably all know someone who has suffered from Alzheimer’s and the film gives an insight into how it feels for each individual. What once seemed clear is now cloudy, what once felt sharp is now blurred. Alice becomes a smudged shadow of her former self.

She is so aware of what lies ahead that she even tries to manage her own suicide, leaving a message to her future self for the moment when she can no longer continue.

The film captures the complex emotions felt by Alice’s family and husband John (Alec Baldwin) as they come to terms with her gradually fading from view. Julianne Moore’s commendably unfussy performance never strikes a false note and she never overplays her hand.

This is a woman who no longer has a clear foothold on the world but the film provides some light to balance the darkness. There is a sense of Alice’s joy in her family and career and of having lived a life filled with love and happiness.

Still Alice is unbearably sad in places but also strangely life affirming. Don’t forget to take a handkerchief as you will need it.