‘Take Me Home’ Review: Liz Sargent’s Intimate Caregiving Drama Confronts a System Built to Fail [B-] Berlinale

Over the past decade, Sundance has increasingly become a home for films that resist spectacle in favor of proximity. That sensibility now finds an extension on the international stage. Liz Sargent’s Take Me Home, expanded from her earlier short film of the same name, premiered in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at the Sundance Film Festival before making its European premiere in the Perspective section at the Berlinale. It is shaped by intimacy rather than scope, favoring a gradual build of pressure, grief and responsibility over dramatic peaks, with mixed results.

Set in the stillness of a Florida suburb, the film opens on images of routine and equilibrium. Palm trees sway, insects hum, water laps against a neighborhood pond. Sargent lingers on these details with a patience that borders on inertia, grounding the story in an environment shaped by repetition rather than momentum. This tranquility is not comfort so much as stasis. From the beginning, Take Me Home establishes a world where very little moves unless it absolutely has to. At the center of this carefully circumscribed universe is Anna, played by Anna Sargent, a 38-year-old woman with a cognitive disability who lives with her aging parents. Her life is structured around repetition. Meals arrive at set times. Errands follow familiar routes. Hygiene is negotiated rather than assumed. These rituals offer stability, but they also underscore the limits of independence within a system that provides little meaningful support. When a sudden family tragedy disrupts this fragile balance, the film resists overt dramatization, allowing the rupture to register through subtle changes in rhythm rather than narrative propulsion.

Sargent’s screenplay favors understatement to the point of near withdrawal. Dialogue is sparse and often utilitarian, surfacing only when silence can no longer carry the weight. The arrival of Anna’s older sister Emily (Ali Ahn) introduces the film’s clearest source of tension. Emily has built a life elsewhere and returns home reluctantly, pulled back by obligation rather than affection. Their scenes gesture toward years of accumulated resentment and guilt, though the film occasionally strains to articulate this history, slipping into moments of over explanation that feel at odds with its otherwise elliptical approach.

Formally, Take Me Home is restrained almost to a fault. Sargent’s camera remains observational and static, favoring functional blocking and unobtrusive framing. There is one notable departure, a brief sequence that visualizes sensory overload through distortion and spatial disorientation, but it stands out precisely because the rest of the film resists such expression. While this aesthetic modesty reinforces the film’s realist intentions, it also flattens moments that might benefit from greater visual or emotional articulation. The material is strong, but the staging rarely deepens it.

The film’s most persuasive asset is its central performance. Anna Sargent anchors the project with a specificity that feels inseparable from lived experience. Much of her dialogue is improvised, and the trust between actor and director is evident throughout. Anna is not framed as inspirational or emblematic. She is stubborn, volatile, affectionate, and frequently difficult. The film’s refusal to desexualize her or smooth over her more disruptive behaviors gives the portrayal a degree of honesty rarely afforded to disabled characters on screen. Marceline Hugot and Victor Slezak offer grounded performances as Anna’s parents, sketching a household held together more by habit than intention. Hugot’s mother figure serves as the emotional stabilizer, while Slezak’s father struggles to maintain authority as his own cognitive decline becomes increasingly apparent. Their cluttered home, packed with unpaid bills, expired food, and deferred decisions, becomes a quiet visual shorthand for systems stretched beyond their limits.

Anna’s sister Emily sharpens the film’s examination of care as labor rather than virtue. Ahn plays her with restraint, allowing flashes of frustration to coexist with genuine affection. A grocery store sequence, stripped of embellishment, sharply conveys financial precarity and the quiet humiliations built into ordinary transactions. The American healthcare system looms as an abstract antagonist, invoked through bureaucratic language and institutional indifference rather than dramatized confrontation. When a care worker remarks that the system is designed to be complicated, it lands less as commentary than resignation. The film’s most divisive choice arrives in its final act. After grounding itself so carefully in observational realism, Take Me Home pivots toward a more ambiguous and symbolic conclusion. The shift gestures toward release, but it also muddies the ethical clarity the film has otherwise maintained. In seeking emotional resolution, the ending feels less like a culmination than a retreat, leaving troubling questions hovering just beyond the frame.

Sargent’s debut is unmistakably sincere and rooted in genuine care, both on screen and behind the camera. Its politics are embedded in process rather than proclamation, and its commitment to accessibility and anti-ableist representation is evident throughout. Yet Take Me Home often mistakes restraint for rigor, and empathy for structure. What remains is a film of real compassion and uneven execution, one that observes carefully but hesitates to push its own insights far enough.

Grade: B-

This review is from the 2026 Berlin International Film Festival, where Take Me Home had its European premiere in the Perspective section following its U.S. Dramatic Competition debut at Sundance.