Liz Sergeant’s debut feature, Take Me Home, is two films in one: it offers a sensitive yet realistic view of the complexities faced by people trying to navigate modern American life when they are different in ways that the systems they must interact with don’t allow for, and a brief glimpse at a radical way of looking at differences which argues that there are no superior or inferior ways of being, only adequate and inadequate ways of providing people with the services they need.
Take Me Home opens in the real world of suburban Florida, where loving parents Joan (Marceline Hugot) and Bob (Victor Slezak) care for their adult daughter Anna (Anna Sergeant), who has unspecified cognitive and emotional difficulties. It’s not entirely clear the limits of Anna’s abilities or the extent of her disabilities: she can read haltingly, for instance, but ignores basic hygiene practices, can be as willful as a toddler, and has a tendency to do absurd things that could put her in real danger. The parents adopted Anna and her sister Emily (Ali Ahn) from Korea, knowing of Anna’s difficulties, but are now experiencing mental and physical declines due to age (vials of medication are everywhere) and find it increasingly difficult to cope.
Their home is comfortable but crammed with stuff, possibly because neither parent is mobile and together enough to really clean while Anna can’t stand for anything in her world to be changed. Their neighborhood is car-centered and isolating, although Anna does have some worthwhile encounters with a friendly neighbor, James (Shane Harper). Anna is covered by both Medicaid and Medicare, but dealing with either system is a nightmare, particularly for parents experiencing their own cognitive difficulties, and there are waiting lists months long for all kinds of services. I’m tempted to say that people who live in a low-tax state (including no individual income tax) can’t expect a high level of services but this isn’t a film about abstractions but rather an intensely personal film about a family trying to deal with their lives.
While the lives of Joan, Bob, and Anna are far from ideal, they’re getting by from day to day until a climate-related disaster strikes. Then Emily has to return from her successful middle-class life in Brooklyn to try to set things right while not missing too much time from her job, which affords her the ability to write checks to replace the expired food in the refrigerator and pay the funeral expenses not covered by insurance. Bob is proud of her but also resentful that she left the family and reacts defensively when she suggests that he make arrangements for Anna’s future. The two sisters share a special bond and their interactions provide some of the sweetest moments in the movie, but Emily can’t both have a career that pays the bills and also meet the needs of Anna and her father. If I squint, I can see a critique of the American belief that individuals and families should be self-sufficient and solve their own problems rather than recognizing that some things may better be treated as collective responsibilities and some failures due to systems rather than people.
My only quibble with Take Me Home is the ending, which leaves the world of naturalism so well-portrayed for most of the film. I hope I’m right that the filmmaker was thinking along the lines I mentioned in the first paragraph and is making an argument for a radically different way of perceiving and caring for people, rather than simply being unable to bring the naturalistic story to a conclusion. That we’ve entered a new reality is clear from shifts in the film’s palette and in its soundtrack (kudos to cinematographer Farhad Ahmed Dehlvi and composers Nathan Halpern and Chris Ruggiero) as well as a narrative break.
Take Me Home won two awards at SLIFF 2026: The Joe Award for Narrative Film as voted by the St. Louis Film Critics Association and the New Filmmakers Forum award for Best Film. It will receive a second screening today (Nov. 15) at 10:30 am at the Hi-Pointe Theatre. Take Me Home was also nominated for Best First Feature at the 2026 Berlin International Film Festival and for the Grand Jury Prize at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, while director Liz Sargent won the Breakthrough Director Award at the 2026 Denver Film Festival and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. | Sarah Boslaugh
Take Me Home was presented as part of 35th annual Saint Louis International Film Festival. Information about tickets and the full festival schedule is available from the Festival web site.
