Author-director Liz Sargent and sister Anna have lived very area of interest lived experiences. As Korean-American adoptees of a working-class household, they’ve skilled a particular form of racial othering many different immigrants do not know. Anna can be cognitively disabled, and has acted as a caretaker for his or her aged dad and mom, and is aware of all too nicely the arcane forms of the troubled healthcare system. Take Me Dwelling, which is predicated off Liz’s 2023 brief movie of the identical which additionally premiered at Sundance, is constructed on intimate information of those uniquely American valleys, and, in the end, the movie’s heat and its heartbreak are reflections of her perspective alone. However its strategy is so diffuse that its unsure and purposefuly ambiguous ending is misguided at greatest, morally doubtful at worst.
Take Me Dwelling‘s endemic verisimilitude is admirable and nicely drawn. Anna, who leads the movie and improvised her means by means of a lot of the dialogue, is extraordinary. There is a distinct high quality to the work which might solely come up from folks with profound belief in one another, and although the movie is closely fictionalized from Liz and Anna’s actual life (for one factor, the 2 are of a set of 11 kids, not simply the 2 depicted), every little thing, from the actual dilapidation of an overcrowded aged individual’s dwelling to the way through which the household goes grocery buying, is imbued with their very own lives. It is an attractive, weak movie.
However the relationship between Anna and her older sister, Emily (Ali Ahn) and that of her father and mom (Victor Slezak and Marceline Hugot, respectively) appears much less just like the story right here than what the director’s personal anxieties are about her sister’s skill to exist in a world that’s basically constructed to forged folks like her apart. “It is designed to be sophisticated,” a care-worker says about American healthcare, and he or she’s proper. Insurance coverage firms exist extra as money-making machines slightly than safeguards for lengthy life.
Regardless of the Movie’s Genuine Voice, the Characters are Lowered to Proxies
It does not assist that Anna’s dwelling life does not appear ultimate. Her mom is tender along with her, however her father is gruff and distant. The house they share is filled with trinkets and stacks of papers and unpaid payments; the mud virtually crawls off the display screen. Their fridge is overflowing with expired items. Anna is pretty low-functioning. Whereas she will gown and feed herself (to a level), she’s immune to primary hygiene and does not appear to get out a lot besides to buy.
She can be vulnerable to rage-filled outbursts that her dad and mom are ill-equipped to pacify, or else they’ve simply turn into so accustomed to her chaos that they find yourself enabling her worst tendencies. For Emily’s half, she has clearly tried to extricate herself as greatest she will from the noise, decamping to Brooklyn the place she has constructed a lifetime of her personal with a cushty job and a boyfriend. She has not been dwelling in two years, and, out of self-protection, continuously ignores her dad and mom’ and her sister’s calls.
However when a sudden tragedy happens, Emily is pressured to return dwelling to re-take up the mantle of caregiver, and should be taught to re-engage along with her sister, who has grown bitter at her persistent absence. Maybe as a result of she is so wrapped up within the multitude of life’s pressures, Emily misses the very clear early indicators of her father’s dementia. What’s constantly novel and brazen concerning the movie is that there’s an unstated stress: what is going to occur to Anna when her father’s mind deteriorates to the purpose the place he can now not take care of her?
For probably the most half, Take Me Dwelling stays within the lane of a fly-on-the-wall observational drama, whereby we’re put within the particularly intimate area of a really explicit existence. However additionally it is continuously exhausting watching Anna get upset again and again as a consequence of her lack of ability to know that she wants the assistance she’s being given. Emily and Anna’s relationship is particular however fraught, and whereas Liz Sargent does nicely to clue us into the difficulties of this household’s life, she is not at all times so eager to indicate us the enjoyment or the connections.
It’s within the movie’s haze that probably the most disturbing of conclusions could be drawn.
The most important drawback with the movie is its audacious closing minutes, a distinctly onerous left flip, which recontextualize a lot of what has preceded it in ways in which increase some severe moral questions. If an individual of Anna’s particular circumstances can’t get the assistance they want, Liz asks, then what are you able to do to not less than get them some reduction? That is a good, provocative query, however the method through which she depicts that reduction comes throughout as clunky and naive. As a result of it’s an ending open to interpretation, it permits room for troubling implications that, in sure gentle, can come throughout as eugenicist.
It is clear that Sargent’s key goal with Take Me Dwelling is her comprehensible frustration with, and nervousness about, a healthcare system that has been pre-designed with out somebody like her sister in thoughts. However, as a result of the movie is overloaded with hassle — the mom’s well being, the daddy’s dementia, the sister’s absence, the household’s monetary woes — every little thing feels unfocused. It’s within the movie’s haze that probably the most disturbing of conclusions could be drawn.
Take Me Dwelling screened on the 2026 Sundance Movie Competition.
Take Me Dwelling
5/10
- Launch Date
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January 26, 2026
- Runtime
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91 minutes
- Director
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Liz Sargent
- Writers
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Liz Sargent
- Producers
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Minos Papas, Apoorva Guru Charan, Liz Sargent
Solid
