Tangles

TANGLES   ***

Leah Nelson

2026

IDEA:  Just as she's settling into her own adult life with an adoring girlfriend and a job as a magazine illustrator, Sarah must contend with her mother's Alzheimer's diagnosis and its effects on her family.

BLURB:  Tangles combines a family-illness drama, a lesbian romance, and a story of artistic self-realization without sacrificing the centrality or power of any of them. You could say they’re entangled. Recalling another adaptation of a graphic memoir, Persepolis (including the black-and-white animation with localized flashes of color), Tangles is the alternately funny and overwhelmingly sad personal journey of a young woman finding her way through circumstances beyond her control. And few things are more excruciatingly uncontrollable than Alzheimer’s. Just as potently as they show how the disease gradually eats away at Midge, Nelson and co-screenwriters Leavitt and Renney depict how profoundly it impacts her family, inflaming rifts between sisters and rattling the normally unflappable patriarch. Sarah is especially torn up, having to negotiate her blossoming romantic and professional lives in San Francisco with her need to be with her mother in Maine. Nobody can be fully there, in space, time, or mental capacity, for the other; not Sarah for her devoted girlfriend Donimo nor the deteriorating Midge for her loyal daughter Sarah, and vice versa. It’s this temporal insurmountability that makes Tangles so heartbreaking. Nelson lays the sentimentality on pretty thick, with generous help from Dan Romer’s score and a couple of song choices that have mercenary intent on your tear ducts (Sarah McLachlan is behind one, naturally). For all its mawkish tendencies, though, the film also glimmers with the plucky spirit and dark humor of its protagonist-author, whose art becomes the means of literally illustrating her storm of emotions. At times, the animation’s simple, solid lines and shapes morph into surreal, vertiginous fantasies that bulge from the screen: a flood of black water, a roulette wheel of illness, Midge breaking into the pieces of a marionette. Tangles proves that art was one of Sarah’s closest companions through her struggles; it’s more than likely Tangles will be someone else’s companion through their own.