Towards the end of 2017 I returned to Singapore from the UK for a short break, and one of the first things I did was to visit my Ah Ma, my grandmother, who had been diagnosed with vascular dementia the year before. When she saw me walk into the room, my Ah Ma addressed me in Hokkien, a Chinese-language vernacular, and a dialogue between the both of us ensued:

It was a short verbal exchange. My mother, who was in the room with me, got extremely excited with this conversation. For her, my Ah Ma announcing that I am back from school immediately when I entered the room was a sign that my Ah Ma still recognised me.

For my mother, ‘You’re back from school’ is attached with the narrative significance commonly associated with the verbal utterances in films about dementia. In Still Alice (Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, 2014, USA/UK/France), for example, at the end of the film, Alice, who lives with early onset Alzheimer's disease, is sat beside her daughter as she is read a portion of the play Angels in America. At the end of the reading, her daughter asks Alice what the play was about. Alice, looking at her daughter, says, ‘love’. Very immediately, music enters the score, infusing the final moments of the film with a sense of affective significance. As the music swells, the film cuts to a wide-angle handheld shot of the younger Alice walking on the beach with her daughter. This final image in Still Alice is shot on Super 8 film, strongly suggesting that this is a flashback of both Alice's and her daughter's more nostalgic and carefree past.

One understanding of the film's last moments is that Alice, a linguistics professor who no longer has the ability to speak properly due to her early onset familial Alzheimer's disease, is still Alice. She continues to remember, and that her enunciation of the word ‘love’ is imbued with all the audio-visual significance of Alice remembering how much she loves her daughter.