Final Rating: 3/5
In 2023, Liz Sargent released a short film called Take Me Home. The short tells the story of Emily, a woman who receives a call from her low-functioning autistic adult sister Anna (played by the director’s own sister Anna), telling her that their mother is not moving. The overwhelmed Emily is forced to return home to settle her deceased mother’s affairs and her sister’s guardianship. Navigating her way through medical paperwork and grief, Emily reconnects with her sister, becoming a more patient and understanding person in the process. Cue the hankies.
Off of the short’s widespread success, Sargent adapted the story into a feature, which premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. Take Me Home (2026) follows autistic woman Anna (played once again by Anna Sargent) who lives with her aging parents in Florida. Her mother Joan, while lucid, has a myriad of physical health problems, while her father Bob (Victor Slezak) remains active physically, but is beginning to display signs of dementia.
When their mother passes, estranged sister Emily (Ali Ahn) returns home to spend time with her family and help with the transitional phase, but goes back to her Big Important Job across the country after a few weeks. Bob struggles to navigate the American Healthcare and Medicare systems for his daughter and himself, while Anna tries to adapt to the radical changes in her life.
It is difficult to overstate how the addition of a single character, Bob, has completely altered nearly every aspect of the story for the worse. In the short, Emily is legally on the hook to figure out Anna’s living situation because she is the only person in Anna’s life; in the feature, having another ‘competent’ adult relieves Emily of duty of care.
Feature Emily finds herself in the difficult position of choosing between her job and her estranged family. Part of her realizes that she should stay home longer and be more involved in the grieving process. However, constant haranguing phone calls from her boss divert her attention, so she throws some money at the situation and goes back to the city.
In a world where she isn’t being pulled in different directions, Emily might realize that her father’s mental state is too poor to become a full-time guardian to someone of Anna’s needs. Distracted or not, Emily’s departure puts both of her remaining relatives in danger.
Since the sisters spend comparatively little time together in the feature, the tone changes from the short’s heartwarming, albeit cliche and saccharine, story of sisterly love to a bleak treatise on the dire state of American healthcare and social welfare programs. The narrative allows Emily to wash her hands of responsibility for the situation and go back to her own life because her father still lives with Anna and can care for her.
Meanwhile, the head of an adult care home informs Bob that the only way he can afford to send Anna to live there is to drop her off, cite dire need, and cut off contact permanently. The state would view continued contact as proof of a potential competent guardian and she would be removed from the home. Bob refuses and pursues other avenues until his dementia becomes too advanced and he wanders off, leaving Anna alone.
The film shines brightest in scenes featuring the two sisters, with Ahn and Sargent delivering strong performances. Director Liz let her real-life autistic sister Anna lead the direction of the scenes with improv to help provide more accurate representation, and the character feels very grounded and well-rounded as a result.
Both Anna and Emily are frustrated with the disruptions to their lives and the communication barrier that has developed between them. Emily has been away for too long, living her big city life and forgetting how to handle her sister’s idiosyncrasies, while Anna cannot articulate her frustrations with her sister and lashes out when she feels ignored.
The moments where the two meet in the middle hint at a long lost bond. During a trip to the grocery store, Anna attempts to steal popsicles and rather than stop the shoplifting, Emily becomes her accomplice, and the two sisters share the stolen popsicles between giggling fits.
Slezak as Bob also gives a compelling performance as a confused father who was always allowed to push the bulk of child care duties to his wife. His sudden thrust into being the primary guardian of his daughter is appropriately frustrated and quietly terrified, especially in the face of his own deteriorating health.
While some of the family’s difficulties come from lack of social support systems, Emily and Bob also display a lack of willingness to consistently engage with Anna’s quirks. Before her passing, Joan was the most skilled at dealing with Anna’s meltdowns, although even she would occasionally throw up her hands and surrender. Bob makes himself scarce when Anna begins to melt down, and Emily shuts Anna down instead of attempting to understand her, which frustrates everyone.
At one point, Anna decides to run away, meeting some frat boy neighbors along the way, and even in their drunken stupor, they gently invite her to spend time with them and include her in their party, showing more patience and kindness to Anna than anyone else in the movie to that point.
Near the end of the film, left alone after Bob wanders off and Emily brushes off her calls, Anna accidentally starts a fire in the microwave. After some artsy transitions, the film cuts to a brighter, more saturated world. Anna is living independently with a support dog in some kind of thriving co-op with several other disabled people, none of whom seem to need human assistance. Lush gardens on sprawling lands with a lake and a restaurant and large facilities contradict the sterile underfunded home Bob failed to enroll Anna into earlier.
Emily and Anna facetime jovially, with Emily free to live her life unencumbered by her sister. The movie gestures towards these last few minutes like ‘See? Wouldn’t it be great if society was built like this? The disabled and elderly free to live on their own terms without having to navigate the labyrinth of American Healthcare?’ While it’s a nice thought, it is so clearly a fantasy world, and completely atonal to the previous 90 minutes.
The film wants Anna to have agency, but the only way to achieve agency requires tonal whiplash to a utopia. While the difficulties of the American health care system are a sad truth, trying to have both the social realism and the fantasy hurts the narrative as a whole. Both Anna and Bob’s stories end in cliffhangers in the real world, and the final 15 minutes feel like an entirely different movie.
In addition, the film remains very uncritical of Emily’s responsibility in her father and sister’s situations. Even if Emily doesn’t realize how far gone her father is mentally, he’s still elderly, so Emily ignoring Anna’s calls is actively irresponsible. She still clearly worries about her sister when she visits, but not enough to keep tabs otherwise.
At one point, Emily starts to suggest that it might be necessary to think about a new living situation ‘for both’ Bob and Anna, but when Bob pushes back, she drops the topic. She has thought about their well-being, but continues to stay detached. Once she goes back home, the audience doesn’t see her again until the fantasy sequence. The short film turned Anna into a prop to further Emily’s story, but it is not possible to neatly de-center Emily in the feature without bringing her responsibility to her family into question.
