There were seven movies about Alzheimer’s at last year’s VIFF. It’s quite the PR blitz, although you know that a degenerative and incurable brain condition has really arrived when somebody of Julianne Moore’s calibre is up on-screen peeing her pants over it. No, really, she pees her pants, in one of the best and most affecting scenes in a film that has naturally bagged an Oscar nomination for the enduringly brilliant actor. Whether Moore’s performance here trumps the fireworks she deployed in Maps to the Stars—which features an even more arresting bathroom sequence—is up for debate, but rest assured that Still Alice is certainly the worthier of the two enterprises, which also makes it much less interesting.

Indeed, there’s little else to distinguish Still Alice from the average Lifetime double-hankie weeper besides the loftiness of its cast. Moore is Columbia linguistics prof Alice Howland, whose cozy Upper West Side existence starts to unravel when she blanks during a lecture. From there, the descent into early-onset Alzheimer’s (she’s only 50) is swift and unforgiving. Writer-directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland (The Fluffer) use some nifty devices to force Alice’s growing disorientation on the viewer, and a simple memory test in her doctor’s office is frightening enough that I seriously advise you to think twice about smoking that blunt before you enter the theatre.

Playing a man forced from equal partner to caregiver, Alec Baldwin registers his growing conflict in the smallest gestures, or in the way he tries to contain his frustration when Alice forgets and blows his dinner plans. (“Sorry, I have Alzheimer’s,” she deadpans.) It’s another fine performance, but Still Alice breaks down almost everywhere else, principally in Alice’s relationship with her two daughters. Her rare congenital form of the disease means that Alice’s kids have been handed the same loaded gun, but the film doesn’t quite know what to do with this dollop of side tragedy, and Kate Bosworth’s turn as the flintier of the two girls leads nowhere. Hunter Parrish’s role as Alice’s son is so inconsequential that it basically evaporates before our eyes, while Kristen Stewart’s cringingly awkward performance as a wannabe actor kills every scene she’s in. What “actor” is this emotionally constipated and shy? With so much riding on Moore’s abundant excellence, Still Alice places too many of its eggs in one basket case.