Take Me Home Review: A Florida Heat Wave Changes Everything for One Family

Some movies are clearly research projects dressed up as drama. Take Me Home is not one of them. Writer-director Liz Sargent didn’t study caregiving from the outside. She grew up inside it. Her own sister, Anna Sargent, plays the lead role here, and that closeness shows up in almost every frame.

This is Sargent’s first feature. It’s an expansion of her 2023 short of the same name, which made the rounds at over 50 festivals and even got a screening at the White House. The full-length version premiered at Sundance in 2026, where it walked away with the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. That’s not a small deal for a debut filmmaker.

What’s It About

Anna is 38. She has a cognitive disability, and she lives with her aging adoptive parents, Joan and Bob, in a quiet Florida suburb. On paper, it sounds like Anna is the one being cared for. In practice, the film makes something clearer and more interesting: caregiving in this house runs in every direction. Anna helps her parents just as much as they help her.

Then a brutal Florida heat wave hits, and the fragile system the family has built starts to crack. Anna’s sister Emily, who’s mostly been absent, gets pulled back into the picture from New York. Old routines fall apart. Nobody in this family has a plan for what happens next — least of all Anna, who suddenly has to figure out what independence could even look like for her.

The Review

What makes Take Me Home stand out isn’t the plot, exactly. It’s the texture. Sargent isn’t in a hurry here. She lets the camera sit in the small stuff — Anna singing along to a song only she can hear through her headphones, a disagreement over popsicles at the grocery store, the quiet choreography of getting someone in and out of a bathtub. None of it feels staged for effect. It feels like a family that’s actually lived this way for years.

That patience pays off in the film’s more charged scenes. A moment of Joan needing her daughter’s help just to stand up. A blow-up over something as small as a snack, followed by a stolen bit of joy right after. The film keeps swinging between tenderness and frustration, sometimes in the same scene, and it never feels manipulative doing it.

Anna Sargent Carries the Film

It’s genuinely hard to separate the performance from the person here, and that’s kind of the point. Anna Sargent isn’t a trained actress with a long resume. This is essentially her first and only film credit. But she’s magnetic on screen — loud when she needs to be loud, quietly devastating in the quieter scenes, and clearly given real room by her sister to just exist as this character rather than perform a version of disability for the camera.

The rest of the cast holds up their end too. Victor Slezak and Marceline Hugot play Bob and Joan with a lived-in naturalism that never tips into melodrama, and Ali Ahn, as sister Emily, gets to carry the film’s most uncomfortable realization: that she had no idea how much her parents had been struggling while she was away.

Where the Film Takes a Swing

By the back half, Take Me Home shifts gears. Without spoiling exactly how, the film starts imagining a different kind of ending for Anna — something closer to hope than realism, a bit reminiscent of the tonal jump The Florida Project pulled off in its own final stretch. It’s a risky move for a film that’s spent an hour being so grounded, and it won’t land the same way for every viewer.

But it works, mostly because the film has earned it. Sargent isn’t pretending the American healthcare and disability-support systems are fine. She’s spent the whole movie showing exactly how they fail families like Anna’s. The ending isn’t a fix for that. It’s Anna, finally, imagining something better for herself.

Who This Is For

If you’re drawn to small, character-driven dramas that don’t rush toward a tidy resolution, this is worth seeking out. It’s also a genuinely important watch if you’ve ever been a caregiver, or been cared for, and felt like nobody was really telling that story honestly on screen.

It’s not a fast movie, and it’s not trying to be entertainment in the traditional sense. Go in expecting something closer to a quiet, honest character study, and you’ll get a lot out of it.

The Verdict

Take Me Home is a confident, deeply personal debut. It treats its characters — and the real disability and caregiving struggles behind them — with a level of care that’s rare to see on screen. Anna Sargent’s performance alone makes it worth watching, and Liz Sargent’s willingness to let the story stay messy, rather than resolve too neatly, makes it linger after the credits roll.

Rating: 4/5

Watch the Trailer

Quick Facts

• Title: Take Me Home
• Director/Writer: Liz Sargent
• Genre: Drama
• Runtime: 91 minutes
• Starring: Anna Sargent, Victor Slezak, Marceline Hugot, Ali Ahn, Shane Harper
• World premiere: Sundance Film Festival, January 2026 — Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award
• Also screened: Berlin International Film Festival (Perspectives section)
• Distributor: Willa
• US release: September 23, 2026

Where to Watch

Take Me Home opens in US theaters on September 23, 2026, through Willa. Check local listings for showtimes near you.

Final Thoughts

Take Me Home isn’t interested in easy answers, and that’s exactly why it works. It’s a film about a family holding each other up in a system that keeps letting them down, led by a performance that couldn’t have come from anywhere but real life. Give it your patience, and it gives you something honest back.

Have you seen “Take Me Home”? Share your thoughts in the comments below.