Tangles

Tangles begins with a quiet but crucial admission: memory is never an objective archive, particularly when a family is trying to reconstruct the years during which one of its members slowly disappeared. Adapted from Sarah Leavitt’s autobiographical graphic novel Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me, the film does not pretend to offer the definitive account of its central tragedy; it presents one daughter’s recollection, shaped by guilt, affection, anger and the strange distortions that accompany grief. That subjectivity becomes the guiding principle of Leah Nelson’s accomplished feature-directing debut, co-written with Sarah Leavitt and Trev Renney. Set in 1999, the story finds Sarah Leavitt establishing herself as an illustrator in San Francisco, where she has found a home within the city’s queer community and begun a promising relationship with the effortlessly self-possessed Donimo. Her emerging adult identity is interrupted by increasingly troubling news from Maine, where her warm, intellectually curious mother, Midge, is behaving in ways that the rest of the family would rather explain away. An iron left switched on, an oddly substituted word and an unexpected burst of hostility initially appear insignificant when considered separately. Together, however, they form the first outline of something nobody is ready to name.

The brilliance of this opening movement lies in its understanding that denial rarely looks like denial from the inside. Midge is only in her mid-fifties, so menopause, exhaustion and professional stress all seem more plausible than early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Her husband, Rob, clings to these explanations, while her daughters respond according to their temperaments: Hannah attempts to preserve the family’s normality, while Sarah becomes the uncomfortable observer who cannot stop noticing the cracks. Even a research trip to Mexico functions as an elaborate act of postponement, as though changing countries might allow the family to outrun the evidence accumulating before them. It also gives Sarah an opportunity to introduce Donimo, combining two milestones that should have belonged to a happier chapter of her life. Instead, Midge’s disorientation transforms unfamiliar streets and crowded celebrations into potential dangers. In one of the film’s most unsettling flights of imagination, a festive Mexican parade mutates into a threatening nightmare after the family loses sight of her. The sequence captures the peculiar terror of caregiving: the surrounding world may remain colourful and exuberant while, for one family, it has suddenly become a maze full of exits.

Animation is not merely an aesthetic inheritance from the graphic memoir but the language through which Tangles makes an invisible illness visible. Its predominantly monochrome, hand-drawn world feels alternately intimate and exposed, resembling a family album whose pages have been rubbed and smudged by repeated handling. Occasional blooms of violet and magenta illuminate desire, memory or emotional shock, although Leah Nelson might have used this expressive device more consistently; the colours become less prominent precisely when the characters’ inner lives grow most complicated. The most successful passages abandon physical realism altogether. Midge’s neurological clock-drawing test expands into an abstract spectacle of confusion, Sarah seems to wade through hostile water as she approaches her childhood home, and domestic spaces contract around characters who can no longer control what is happening inside them. A particularly sharp transition moves from Sarah’s frustration to the smoke of a restaurant dragon, turning an ordinary cut into a flash of displaced fury. These images justify the choice of animation far more convincingly than a faithful reproduction of the book’s panels ever could: they show not simply what happened, but what remembering it feels like.

That visual inventiveness is matched by an unusually humane sense of humour. The film recognises that families facing catastrophe do not immediately begin speaking in solemn monologues; they make tasteless jokes, quarrel over practicalities and seize whatever scraps of absurdity remain available. While awaiting Midge’s diagnosis, Sarah’s imagination turns the clinic into a casino in which every alternative condition, however dreadful, suddenly seems preferable to Alzheimer’s. Elsewhere, the public-address system on her repeated cross-country flights begins voicing the despair she cannot comfortably articulate herself. These gags are not evasions from the subject but survival mechanisms, and their gradual disappearance measures the progression of the disease more effectively than any calendar. One of the warmest anecdotes involves Zach, Hannah’s cheerfully ungainly boyfriend, trying to raise everyone’s spirits with a guitar and 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up?” It is a moment that could easily have become unbearably sentimental, yet its awkwardness saves it: families often remember the imperfect gesture more vividly than the eloquent speech. The soundtrack’s period-specific, female-fronted rock also situates Sarah’s life without smothering it in generic nostalgia, allowing the music to feel like something selected from her own car stereo rather than imposed by a marketing department.

The voice performances lend unusual texture to characters who might otherwise have become representatives of familiar positions within a disease narrative. Abbi Jacobson gives Sarah an appealing mixture of awkwardness, impatience and fierce moral certainty; she can be compassionate without always being agreeable, and the performance acknowledges the resentment concealed within her sense of duty. Julia Louis-Dreyfus is exceptional as Midge, first establishing her wit, intelligence and maternal openness, then allowing speech itself to become increasingly unreliable. She resists turning deterioration into a sequence of conspicuous acting showcases. A misplaced emphasis, a defensive pause or a sentence that seems to lose its destination communicates more than a dramatic outburst could. Bryan Cranston voices Rob with weary tenderness, particularly as denial gives way to the unglamorous routine of care, while Beanie Feldstein ensures that Hannah’s different response never feels like a simple failure of courage. Samira Wiley brings patience and grounded sensuality to Donimo, and Seth Rogen, Pamela Adlon, Sarah Silverman, Wanda Sykes, Bowen Yang and Philip Rosenthal add recognisable comic energies without entirely disrupting the film’s intimate scale, though the celebrity casting occasionally draws attention to itself rather than to the characters.

Just as importantly, Tangles refuses to manufacture conflict around Sarah’s sexuality. A childhood memory of Midge taking her daughter to a Pride parade, along with an affectionate montage of conversations through which mother and daughter gradually acknowledge Sarah’s identity, reveals how thoroughly Midge helped create the freedom Sarah now enjoys. This makes the illness especially cruel: Sarah is compelled to suspend the independent life her mother encouraged in order to care for the woman who may no longer remember encouraging it. The distance between San Francisco and Maine therefore becomes more than geography. It is the distance between the self Sarah is building and the daughter she is still expected to be, between chosen community and inherited responsibility, between desire and obligation. The film is perceptive about the quiet damage produced by that division. Sarah’s relationship and career do not collapse in one convenient dramatic explosion; they are gradually starved of attention by cancelled plans, emergency journeys and the exhausting conviction that she should always be somewhere else.

There are moments when Tangles relies too heavily on the established machinery of the prestige tearjerker. Its late musical cues announce emotions that the animation and performances have already communicated, and its instinctive generosity sometimes prevents the family’s resentments from becoming as raw or specific as they might have been. The adaptation can also resemble an animated scrapbook rather than a fully transformed cinematic work, moving through incidents because they mattered in life without always finding the strongest dramatic architecture to connect them. Yet these reservations do not erase its considerable emotional intelligence. The film understands that Alzheimer’s produces two simultaneous losses: the afflicted person is deprived of memory, while the family becomes burdened with remembering on that person’s behalf. Every photograph, home video and anecdote consequently acquires the urgency of evidence. Tangles is ultimately more than a eulogy for Midge; it is an act of gratitude toward a mother whose love gave her daughter permission to become herself. Warm, candid and occasionally devastating, it holds out a hand to anyone who has watched recognition vanish from a familiar face—and reminds us that preserving a life means remembering its laughter, irritation, embarrassment and ordinary mess as carefully as its final sorrow.

Tangles
Directed by Leah Nelson
Written by Leah Nelson, Sarah Leavitt, Trev Renney, 
Based on the graphic memoir by Sarah Leavitt
Produced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Lauren Miller Rogen, James Weaver, Alex McAtee, Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Ross Murray, Jen Ray, Sophie Hoegh, Vicky Patel, Steve Barnett, Alan Powell
Starring: Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Abbi Jacobson, Bryan Cranston, Beanie Feldstein, Seth Rogen, Samira Wiley, Pamela Adlon, Sarah Silverman, Bowen Yang, Wanda Sykes
Cinematography: NC
Edited by David Avery
Music by Dan Romer
Production companies: Point Grey Pictures, Monarch Media, Giant Ant Films, Lylas Pictures
Distributed by: Nour Films (France)
Release dates: January 20, 2027 (France)
Running time: 102 minutes

Seen on 6 September 2026 at the Deauville International Center