Alice is a professor of linguistics at Columbia University in New York, is married is in her fifties, and has three children.

Following the loss of traces of memory, initially related to the use of certain words and other alarming episodes, she consults a neurologist who after extensive diagnostic investigations finds the presence of early-onset familial Alzheimer's disease.

In addition to her illness, Alice must deal with the pain of communicating the possibility of genetic inheritance to her children.

Thus begins the story of a woman who will face the disease with extreme dignity, trying to fight and prolong the quality of her life through continuous memory tests to which she will undergo daily.

She will not hesitate to record the instructions she must follow when she finds herself at the point of no return; when memory is permanently lost and meaning vanished.

A story that presents a bitter account that of the impossibility of a cure and therefore of hope; a film that deals with the theme of the irreversibility of pain without pathetic lapses or exhibitionism, through the careful and emotional information made about a disease that causes the gradual decline of cognitive faculties.

Losing track of one's existence, while alive, seems a cruel game that even death cannot play, and Alice, through the face of Julianne Moore, lives her drama with perfect expressive signs that dose the loss of presence to herself.

The ability to interpret the heinousness of a pathology that alters to the point of impeding the relationship making it fragmentary and disconnected, absurd and atrocious as the metaphor of a fading existence.

If the only truly serious philosophical problem is to judge whether or not life is worth living, Camus said, according to Alice it certainly was. Accepting the harrowing and wonderful wager of life perhaps by not having to provide oneself with the instructions to end the absurdity the moment one no longer has the opportunity to do so.

Perhaps that is what this film tried to say as well.

27-Jun-2023 by Beatrice