Disturbing portrait of life in a nursing home. A handicapped resident shares his experiences in an openhearted and occasionally funny way. Thanks to the lyrical-realistic style, it is both a raw and a poetic film that looks, but never judges. Shot in the corridors and rooms of a small retirement home somewhere in America, The Patron Saints shows fragments from the lives of the needy and often senile inhabitants. The old lady who keeps wondering why she is here; the man who repeatedly tries to escape; the physically and mentally handicapped woman who has been abused for years by her brother. We see them in the surroundings where they spend their latter years, in disconcerting and nerve-wracking, but also moving and humorous scenes. Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky altogether spent about four years in the retirement home for this meticulously constructed, hyperrealistic lament about the latter days of human life. Our guide is Jim, the youngest inhabitant of the home and a real gossip of the purest kind. While his body is paralysed, that does nothing to reduce his vitality and he has a story to fit with every inhabitant.