Take Me Home review: an authentic family drama marred by a disturbing ending

Take Me Home review: Emotionally raw family drama is undone by morally questionable implications

Published Jan 26, 2026, 7:15 PM EST

Gregory Nussen is Screen Rant’s senior film critic. They have previously written for Deadline Hollywood, Slant Magazine, Backstage and Salon. Other bylines: In Review Online, Vague Visages, Bright Lights Film Journal, The Servant, The Harbor Journal, Boing Boing Knock-LA and IfNotNow’s Medium. They received the 2022 New York Film Critics Circle Graduate Prize in Criticism and are proud members of GALECA, the Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics. They co-host the Great British Baking Podcast. Gregory also has a strong performing career: his most recent solo performance, QFWFQhas been nominated for five awards, winning Best Solo Theater at the Hollywood Fringe Festival in 2025.

Writer-director Liz Sargent and her sister Anna have had some very specialized experiences. As Korean-American adoptees from a working-class family, they experienced a specific type of racial otherness that many other immigrants are unaware of. Anna is also cognitively impaired, has cared for their elderly parents, and is all too familiar with the arcane bureaucracy of a struggling healthcare system. Take me homewhich is based on Liz’s 2023 short film, which also premiered at Sundance, relies on an intimate knowledge of these quintessentially American valleys and, ultimately, the film’s warmth and sorrow are a reflection of his point of view alone. But its approach is so diffuse that its uncertain and deliberately ambiguous ending is at best misguided, at worst morally dubious.

Take me homeThe endemic verisimilitude of is admirable and well drawn. Anna, who directs the film and improvises much of the dialogue, is extraordinary. There’s a distinct quality to the work that can only come from people having deep trust in each other, and although the film is heavily fictionalized from Liz and Anna’s real lives (for one thing, the two are part of a group of 11 children, not just the two depicted), everything from the peculiar dilapidation of an elderly person’s overcrowded home to the way the family goes about shopping is infused with its own lives. It’s a beautiful and vulnerable film.

But the relationship between Anna and her older sister, Emily (Ali Ahn), and that of her father and mother (Victor Slezak and Marceline Hugot, respectively) feels less like the story here than the director’s concerns about her sister’s ability to exist in a world that is fundamentally constructed to sideline people like her. “It’s designed to be complicated,” one caregiver says of American health care, and she’s right. Insurance companies exist more as money-making machines than guarantees for a long life.

Despite the film’s authentic voice, the characters are reduced to proxies

It doesn’t help that Anna’s home life doesn’t seem ideal. Her mother is tender with her, but her father is gruff and distant. The house they share is filled with trinkets, piles of papers, and unpaid bills; dust practically escapes from the screen. Their fridge is overflowing with expired products. Anna functions quite poorly. Although she can dress and feed herself (to some extent), she resists basic hygiene and doesn’t seem to go out much except to go shopping.

She is also prone to fits of rage that her parents are either not equipped to quell, or they have become so accustomed to her chaos that they end up enabling her worst tendencies. For her part, Emily clearly tried to extricate herself from the noise as best she could, decamping to Brooklyn where she built her own life with a comfortable job and a boyfriend. She has not been home for two years and, to protect herself, often ignores calls from her parents and sister.

But when a sudden tragedy strikes, Emily is forced to return home to take up the role of caregiver and must learn to reconnect with her sister, who has become bitter over her continued absence. Perhaps because she is so absorbed by the multitude of pressures of life, Emily fails to see the very clear early signs of her father’s dementia. What’s always new and brazen about the film is that there’s an unspoken tension: What will happen to Anna when her father’s brain deteriorates to the point that he can no longer care for her?

For the most part, Take me home remains on the path of a breathtaking observational drama, in which we are placed in the particularly intimate space of a very particular existence. But it’s also often exhausting to watch Anna get upset over and over again because of her inability to understand that she needs the help she’s getting. Emily and Anna’s relationship is special but strained, and while Liz Sargent does well to explain to us the difficulties of this family’s lives, she’s not always as eager to show us joy or connection.

It is in the mist of the film that we can draw the most disturbing conclusions.

The film’s biggest problem lies in its audacious final minutes, a distinctly abrupt left turn, which recontextualizes much of what came before it in a way that raises serious ethical questions. If someone in Anna’s particular situation can’t get the help she needs, Liz asks, then what can you do to at least provide some relief? It’s a fair and provocative question, but the way she describes this relief seems clumsy and naive. Because it is an ending open to interpretation, it leaves room for troubling implications that, from certain angles, can appear eugenic.

It is clear that Sargent’s key target with Take me home It’s her understandable frustration and anxiety over a healthcare system that was pre-designed without someone like her sister in mind. But because the film is overloaded with problems – the mother’s health, the father’s dementia, the absence of the sister, the family’s financial difficulties – everything seems blurry. It is in the mist of the film that we can draw the most disturbing conclusions.