Sean Wilson’s short but searching exploration of dementia opens as Grace, an elderly widow, walks down the middle of a busy road. This episode reveals the ways in which Grace’s world can be both deeply disorienting and uncannily beautiful: she mistakes the headlights of cars for torches carried by “children, hand in hand, running at an impossible speed”. This near miss leads her daughter Liz to place her mother in a nursing home, where Grace struggles to come to terms with her new living circumstances.
Wilson’s decision to show us Grace in many forms and moments of time is what sets You Must Remember This apart: we see her not only as an elderly woman, but also as a girl, a daughter, a teenager, a mother and a wife. It’s a detailed portrait, made all the more complex by Wilson’s use of flashbacks; every part of Grace’s life we see comes in the form of a memory that she experiences as the present. These past and present threads weave together melancholy, longing, regret, sadness – but also happiness and joy: “The things she remembers seem to find her more than she finds them. They come to her in pieces, like pages cut from a book and scattered in the wind.”
