Harrowing, and heartbreaking.

Take Care of Maya tells the true story of Maya Kowalski, a ten-year-old girl whose battle with a rare and debilitating pain condition spiralled into an accusation of Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Within months, Maya was in state custody, her mother was dead, and a family that had done everything the system asked of them was being treated as the enemy. What happened to the Kowalskis — and how quickly it happened — is what makes this film so difficult to shake.

The Kowalskis are not a complicated case on paper. A loving mother, Beata, who advocated relentlessly for her daughter's treatment; a father who worked; a little brother; a girl in genuine, documented pain. But when Maya arrived at Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital, the medical team read her mother's fierce advocacy in the darkest possible light. The documentary lays out, step by devastating step, how a family fighting for help was reinterpreted as a family manufacturing illness — and how little it took to take a child away.

What lingers is the procedural cruelty of it all. The film walks through the court hearings, the supervised visits, the mounting medical bills and the isolation with a patient, forensic eye, letting the paperwork and the recordings do the damage. There is no dramatic reenactment here, no salacious twist — just a mother drowning in a system designed to protect children that, in this telling, could not see the child in front of it. The final act, in which the family finally has its day in court, is as gutting as true crime gets.

This story stays with you long after it's over. If you can stomach a film about a system failing the very people it exists to serve, Take Care of Maya is essential watching — bring tissues, and maybe a day afterward to sit with it.