Review: ‘Take Me Home’ follows a family reckoning with disability and decline
2026 / Dir. Liz Sargent / 2026 Sundance Film Festival
Rating: 4/5
Watch if you like: Coda, Amour, anxiously watching someone put tinfoil in the microwave.
In Take Me Home, writer-director Liz Sargent depicts a scenario that many of us know, at least parts of, all too well. Anna (Anna Sargent), a Korean adoptee with a cognitive disability, lives with her aging parents, where mom has mobility issues and dad appears to be in the early stages of cognitive decline. They’re all just making it in a fragile balance, until they’re not. Depicting the cold realities of the American medical system as well as the warm, quiet moments of family life that continue despite the circumstances, Take Me Home dares to ask if it has to be this way.
Sargent takes elements from her own life, including giving her sister Anna the opportunity to deliver a remarkable performance. Using an improvisational structure that gave Anna the lead in working with the material and reaching the required plot and emotional beats, Take Me Home can feel revolutionary in its honest portrayal of disability. Heartbreaking and often quite beautiful, Take Me Home is a truthful depiction of the American experience and how we continue to be failed at every turn by our leadership, as well as the resolve to keep going and hope for a better way of being.