Genuine Household Drama Marred by Troubling Ending

As Korean-American adoptees of a working-class household, writer-director Liz Sargent and sister Anna have skilled a particular type 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 properly the arcane paperwork of the troubled healthcare system. Take Me Housebased mostly on Liz’s 2023 quick movie of the identical which additionally premiered at Sundance, is constructed on intimate data of those uniquely American valleys, and, finally, the movie’s heat and its heartbreak are reflections of her perspective alone. However its method is so diffuse that its unsure and purposefully ambiguous ending is misguided at finest.

Take Me House‘s endemic verisimilitude is admirable and properly drawn. Anna, who leads the movie and improvised her means by way of a lot of the dialogue, is extraordinary. There is a distinct high quality to the work which arises solely from individuals with profound belief in one another. Although the movie is closely fictionalized from Liz and Anna’s actual life (for one factor, the 2 are of a set of 11 youngsters, not simply the 2 depicted), every part, from the actual dilapidation of an overcrowded aged individual’s house to the style during which the household goes grocery purchasing, 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 (Victor Slezak) and mom (Marceline Hugot) appears much less like the main focus right here than the director’s personal anxieties about her sister’s skill to exist in a world that’s basically constructed to solid individuals like her apart. “It is designed to be difficult,” a care-worker says about American healthcare, and he or she’s proper. Insurance coverage corporations exist extra as money-making machines fairly than safeguards for lengthy life.

Regardless of the Movie’s Genuine Voice, the Characters are Lowered to Proxies

It would not assist that Anna’s house life would not appear ideally suited. 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 fundamental hygiene and would 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 develop 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 finest she will from the noise, decamping to Brooklyn the place she has constructed a lifetime of her personal with a snug job and a boyfriend. She has not been house in two years, and, out of self-protection, often ignores calls from her dad and mom and sister.

However when a sudden tragedy happens, Emily is compelled to return house 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 persistently novel and brazen in regards to the movie is that there’s an unstated stress: what’s going to occur to Anna when her father’s mind deteriorates to the purpose the place he can now not look after her?

For probably the most half, Take Me House stays within the lane of a fly-on-the-wall observational drama, whereby we’re put within the particularly intimate house of a really explicit existence. However it is usually often exhausting watching Anna get upset again and again because of her incapability to grasp that she wants the assistance she’s being given. Emily and Anna’s relationship is particular however fraught, and whereas Liz Sargent does properly 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.

The most important downside with the movie is its audacious closing minutes, a distinctly laborious left flip, which recontextualize a lot of what has preceded it in ways in which elevate some critical 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 a minimum of get them some reduction? That is a good, provocative query, however the method during 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 mild, can come throughout as eugenicist.

It is clear that Sargent’s key goal with Take Me House 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 part feels unfocused. The movie’s haze, sadly, invitations probably the most disturbing of conclusions.

Take Me House screened on the 2026 Sundance Movie Pageant.