A woman deliberately injures herself just to be in the care of a particular ER nurse. But when she’s discharged from the hospital earlier than expected, she needs to find a new way to extend her stay.
Director’s Vision for ‘Take Care’
Hospitals were a strange but defining backdrop to my early life. My mom started undergoing every cancer treatment imaginable when I was two, so for years, Northwest Community Hospital was my stomping ground. Because I couldn’t grasp the heaviness, I thought I was living the high life—nonstop sleepovers with my mom fueled by vending machine snacks and collecting gift shop stuffed animals like trophies. The endless parade of nurses showering me with attention and care made me feel like the floor celebrity. But eventually the treatments stopped working and my mom, Laura, passed away at thirty-one. At six, I was left to navigate a world that suddenly felt far less nurturing.
Losing a parent as a child rewires your entire understanding of the world, often in ways you don’t even realize until much later. I tried to fill the void in me with achievements and striving to be the best at everything, but ultimately it was always to receive special care and attention in return. That deep longing for care – especially in the absence of my mother – is a feeling I’m intimately familiar with.
As a filmmaker, I’ve always resonated with characters who take extreme, desperate measures to get an emotional need met. In my film TAKE CARE, you meet Leah as she’s about to stab down onto her hand with a kitchen knife. You don’t yet understand why, but you know one thing: she has to do this. In the background you hear birds chirping alongside an eerie score. It’s deranged, yet still grounded.
When Leah finally gets wheeled into her room at the hospital, she’s oddly at peace. To Leah, the hospital is a place where care is not just given, it’s expected. And specifically, Leah finds comfort in Nelly, the sweet middle-aged nurse who treated her recently for a car accident. The scene where Nelly takes care of Leah’s wound is dream-like, juxtaposing the grotesqueness of her gory wound. But once Leah is discharged earlier than she expected, you can feel her heartbreak. As she’s about to lose hope, she stumbles upon an even greater idea. An idea that would allow her to spend more time in the safety of the hospital with Nelly.
TAKE CARE is a darkly comedic examination of a woman who is willing to commit harm against herself in order to be nurtured.
