‘Take Me Home’ Review: A Sensitive Family Drama Upended by an Unearned Conclusion

In one of the first scenes of “Take Me Home,” main character Anna (Anna Sargent) shares a shower with her mother Joan (Marceline Hugot) as the two gently shampoo each other. The boundary between who’s the caregiver and who’s being cared for is intentionally made unclear, a succinct reflection of the co-dependent, precarious dynamic they share with each other and Anna’s father Bob (Victor Slezak).

In the slow, humid Florida suburban home they share, Anna — an adult Asian adoptee with cognitive disabilities — struggles with impulse control and basic hygiene, but is relied upon by her physically ailing mother and her father, whose mental health is on the decline. Crowded atop each other in their messy house, the three have a habit of getting into dangerous situations: early on, Bob nearly runs Anna over while she’s reaching for her water bottle stuck underneath his car. Their affection for each other as they make shopping trips is evident, but it’s clear this arrangement can’t last forever. And when Joan abruptly dies from a heat stroke in a devastatingly mundane scene, it puts the question of what happens next for Anna and Bob into stark relief.

“Take Me Home” is a barefaced personal project for writer-director Liz Sargent, who cast her own sister Anna in the role of the lightly fictionalized protagonist. The character of Emily (Ali Ahn), Anna’s younger sister living in Brooklyn who flies down in the wake of their mother’s death to look after her father and daughter, is then a bit of an an author avatar, a reflection of the director’s real-life relationship with her sister that takes the film to some raw and relatable places.

Adapting her own short film of the same name from 2023 into her debut feature, Sargent shows talent at constructing a down-to-Earth, largely observational character study that admirably doesn’t lean too hard on inspirational pathos or turgid trauma porn to generate drama or emotion. It makes for a very promising first feature, one that unfortunately undercuts itself with an underwhelming, emotionally vapid fantasy of a conclusion.

For most of its runtime, though, “Take Me Home” strikes a delicate balance between humor and heartbreak in its family drama, observing the messy emotions that unspool out of its three main characters in the wake of Joan’s death without much unearned sentimentality. Bob, in his grief, is more frustrated and shorter-tempered with his daughters than usual, while Anna’s ability to function declines. Emily, an interlooper in their home, is determined to set a plan but frustrated by her sister’s outbursts and her father’s passivity.

As written by Sargent, the characters’ relationships are multifaceted, complex and real: there moments of ugliness, such as a brutal fight between Anna and Emily where Anna screams she doesn’t love her anymore, are contrasted with moments of joy that come from shopping trips where they steal ice pops from the supermarket. Uncomfortable truths are left to linger under the surface, including in a heart-to-heart between Emily and her father where he’s unable to give a real answer when she asks if he ever thought through the issues that would come from adopting a child with a disability. DP Farhad Ahmed Dehlvi shoots the film with a dark tint, ably capturing the murky, humid atmosphere that makes this home even more oppressive.

All three main actors deliver performances that are understated, but sneak up on you with their complexity. Slezak’s morose, tired face proves an effective canvas for Bob’s inner grief, and he’s often adds levity with some dry humor as well. Ahn is sharper and flintier, but conveys the anxiety and mounting pressures Emily is facing quite well. She has an effective, lovely, and believable chemistry with Anna Sargent that makes their characters’ relationship the heart of the film; when she departs the story again late into the film, you feel it.

And Anna Sargent proves a wonderfully unguarded and able performer, proving alternatively funny and deeply sensitive. The script avoids making the character a pat stereotype: she can sometimes verge on the childish in her outbursts, but she’s also an adult woman who watches porn in her bedroom and can strike up a friendship playing beer pong with a bunch of macho guys living in her neighborhood. The film, without proving didactic, untangles the complications of finding appropriate care for someone with her cognitive disabilities, as Emily and Bob struggle with a healthcare system that isn’t set up to support people like her.

Which makes the ending all the more of a shame. Rather than seeing through the film’s threads to a real conclusion, Sargent opts to jump from a moment of pure despair to a moment that, in its brightly lit cinematography and tranquil utopian bliss, seems to be a pure dream. The obvious comparison may be Sean Baker’s “The Florida Project,” another down-to-Earth story that ends in a blissful moment of fantasy rather than confronting harder realities. For “Take Me Home,” which proves to be at its strongest when it’s living in the characters’ mundane realities, it’s a fatal miscalculation, one that leaves the film feeling unfinished and at odds with itself. The ending doesn’t exactly erase what “Take Me Home” does well, but it does leave the film a much more dispiriting watch than it otherwise would have been, a promising drama that betrays it’s own best qualities.

Grade: C+

“Take Me Home” premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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