Take Me Home

Brutally patient and triumphant in its love for its characters, it captures reality with painstaking clarity while reimagining a better world.

This is not an autobiography. Take Me Home is instead a deeply felt examination of the challenges so many face when familial love is swamped by economic reality. The director puts a lot on her characters’ shoulders to illustrate how unsupported and isolated illness and disability can be.

There isn’t a predictable or hackneyed exchange in the drama, which understands not just the immense challenges its characters face but also the throwaway humor that can be essential to a family’s connective tissue.

The film is at its best in moments of warmth, humor, and kindness—that is where it really shines, without needing to amp up the stakes or shift forms.

A sensitive drama that marks a notably personal feature debut.

Sargent shows talent at constructing a down-to-Earth, largely observational character study that admirably doesn’t lean too hard on inspirational pathos or turgid trauma porn to generate drama or emotion. It makes for a very promising first feature, one that unfortunately undercuts itself with an underwhelming, emotionally vapid fantasy of a conclusion.

Its approach is so diffuse that its uncertain and purposefully ambiguous ending is misguided at best.