Netflix users only have a little time left to watch an overlooked Elliot Page film before it leaves the service, and the story behind it is far more unsettling than many people might expect.
Tallulah, the 2016 comedy-drama starring Elliot Page and Allison Janney, is set to leave Netflix on July 29, 2026.
The film centers on Tallulah, a drifter played by Page, who takes a baby away from a neglectful mother and then tells her ex-boyfriend’s mother, played by Janney, that the child is hers.
Even though the characters and events on screen were fictionalized, the idea for Tallulah came from a very real and deeply uncomfortable experience in director Sian Heder’s life.
Heder used that experience as the basis for her 2006 short film Mother, and later built Tallulah from it. The short was drawn from a time when she had recently moved to Los Angeles and was taking babysitting jobs for hotel guests while trying to find her footing in the entertainment industry.
What seemed like a straightforward way to earn money ended up leaving a lasting impression, as she explained to LAist in 2016.
On one shift, Heder was asked to watch a child while the boy’s wealthy mother had checked into a hotel specifically to carry on an affair.
According to Heder, the woman was drunk and incapable of properly caring for her child. Heder reported what she had seen to hotel staff, but was told there was nothing they could really do because no direct abuse had taken place.
“I actually cried on the way home,” Heder said. “And then I sat down immediately and wrote this scene… [that] became the short. I was just, ‘I have to write that down.’ That was one of the weirdest things that’s ever happened to me. I just knew there was something to it. So I shot a short.”
That short eventually became the foundation for a feature film. Per the LA Times, Heder blended the emotional core of Mother with another idea she had been working on about a young woman living out of a van. Route One Entertainment and Blue Ocean Entertainment later picked up the screenplay, and Page and Janney signed on in 2015.
Heder would later go on to direct CODA, which became a major awards-season success and won her the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2022. That makes Tallulah an early look at the same filmmaker whose work would later reach a much wider audience.
The finished movie takes the original premise much further, especially by adding the storyline in which Janney’s character is led to believe the baby is actually her grandchild.
Still, the film stays focused on the same troubling question that first inspired Heder: what happens when children are neglected in ways the system does not properly address, and who is supposed to step in.
Page and Janney had previously shared the screen in Juno and Touchy Feely before coming back together for Tallulah, which premiered at Sundance in January 2016 before later arriving on Netflix.