Sundance ’26: ‘TAKE ME HOME’ A Tender Condemnation of American Care

Anna may be an adult, but her cognitive impairment (unspecified in the film, though decidedly on the autism spectrum) means she requires close care from her adoptive parents. The issue is that they’re now elderly and ailing themselves, hardly ideal caretakers. When Anna’s mother dies unexpectedly, her care falls to her father (Victor Slezak), who appears to be grappling with a case of undiagnosed dementia that anyone who bothered to spend more than a few minutes with him would pick up on immediately. To make matters worse, no care facilities in Florida can take Anna in, thanks to endless waitlists for public options and prohibitively expensive private care.

So the two soldier on alone, despite Dad forgetting where he is, flooding the kitchen by leaving the sink running, or the minor catastrophe that is making a box of pasta when neither has ever cooked for themselves before. The only person who could ostensibly step in is Anna’s also-adopted sister Emily (Ali Ahn), but that would mean abandoning her demanding job and, by extension, her ability to support herself and her family. For this family, the system is truly broken.

This is the terrain of Take Me Home, a tender, quietly devastating drama from writer-director Liz Sargent, in an expansion of her 2023 short of the same name. The intimate and deeply human film stars Sargent’s real-life sister, Anna Sargent, who lives with cognitive disabilities yet delivers a performance that balances heart and humor with striking ease. The film is rooted in Sargent’s stark realization: society simply isn’t built to support the differently abled. What little scaffolding exists is tangled in red tape, designed to be so maddeningly opaque and boobytrapped that it practically dares people to give up before they can access the services they desperately need.

Sargent’s film highlights this systemic failure with clear-eyed compassion, anchored by a strong point of view and a lead performance that feels both lived-in and deeply personal. Its scale is modest, but its emotional and political resonance is undeniable, though it’s unlikely to break beyond the festival circuit. Still, it’s a work made with palpable care, one that honors the disabled community not through platitudes, but through realism rooted in experience. The ending may strike some as open-ended and others as painfully obvious, and only underscores how fundamentally broken our support systems are. The only people still optimistic about them are those who’ve never been fed through the bureaucratic meat grinder themselves.

CONCLUSION: ‘Take Me Home’ is a quiet but impactful debut feature from Liz Sargent, centering on her sister Anna Sargent as a cognitively impaired adoptee who must navigate the world and her father’s cognitive decline after their fragile family dynamic suddenly collapses.