‘Tangles’ Review: Striking Animation Honors an Artist’s Heartbreaking Account of Losing Her Mother to Alzheimer’s

The distinctive visual storytelling of Canadian cartoonist Sarah Leavitt is deftly and stylishly transferred to the big screen in “Tangles,” an honestly felt and highly affecting adaptation of her autobiographical graphic novel of the same name. Chronicling with tenderness and idiosyncratic humor her mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease, Leavitt’s memoir has become a touchstone work for many enduring the same cruel rite of passage with their loved ones. Co-written with the author, and largely preserving the text’s visual and narrative singularity, Leah Nelson‘s candid, funny and incrementally heartbreaking adult animated feature — an impressive debut for the helmer — deserves to do the same.

Related Stories

'Star Wars' Day: Fans Streamed Franchise for 33 Billion Minutes in 2025

White House Posts Image of Trump as the Mandalorian to Celebrate Star Wars Day

A characterful and extremely well-cast voice ensemble — including Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Abbi Jacobson and Bryan Cranston in principal parts, with producer Seth Rogen among the cameoing talent — reps an additional selling point for “Tangles,” premiering in Cannes’ non-competitive Special Screenings section, and sure to attract interest from distributors and streamers with an eye for prestige animation. LGBT-focused buyers and festival programmers, furthermore, should be drawn to the film’s proudly specific grounding in Leavitt’s queer life and identity, with the well-drawn subplot of a formative lesbian romance a spirit-lifting counterpart to the intimate family tragedy unfolding elsewhere.

In one significant change from the source material, the story has been relocated from Vancouver — home city of both Leavitt and Nelson — to the U.S., perhaps in part to more legibly delineate the growing physical and spiritual divide in its protagonist’s life. Here, the twentysomething Sarah (Jacobson) is caught between coasts: Her family home is in sleepy suburban Maine, while she’s carved out a place for herself in the vibrant queer scene of San Francisco, working as a receptionist and sometime illustrator at a hip alt-weekly, with a busy social life revolving around lesbian nightclubs and right-on political demonstrations. The year is 1999, and the city’s evolution into a scarcely affordable tech capital is in progress, but not yet complete.

An aspiring artist and cartoonist, Sarah’s loose, jagged, semi-surreal drawings reflect her restlessly engaged and excited view of the world — and in turn define the film’s spunky, witty 2D animation style, executed mostly in sharply nuanced monochrome, with sporadic highlights of color (often in luminous violet or magenta) to emphasize core memories, flights of imagination or surges of feeling. Though art director Manddy Wyckens doesn’t especially imitate Leavitt’s less polished aesthetic, the film deftly channels a spontaneous, hand-drawn illustrative rhythm, in line with the sensibility of a character who sometimes draws her emotions more lucidly than she expresses them — and thus giving “Tangles” far more than just a decorative reason for its medium.

It’s in San Francisco where Sarah feels most fully and expressively herself, surrounded by like-minded friends and co-workers — and Donimo (Samira Wiley), a formidably cool but disarmingly Zen motorcyclist with whom she begins, much to her own surprise, a passionate relationship. Not that family trips to Maine are any kind of ordeal. Sarah is loved and accepted by her liberal-minded academic parents Midge (Louis-Dreyfus) and Rob (Cranston) and younger sister Hannah (Beanie Feldstein), while pointed domestic details and childhood flashbacks paint a full picture of a supportive household environment that fostered our heroine’s intelligence and individuality.

On one such trip, however, Sarah notices some erratic behavior on Midge’s part: an iron left on, a word misused, a tetchily defensive response to any observation of these errors. Only in her mid-fifties, Midge is busy and content in her life. Dementia wasn’t on anyone’s list of immediate concerns, and Rob reasons that stress may be behind these out-of-character glitches. But an ostensibly restorative vacation to Mexico — which Sarah uses as an occasion to introduce her parents to Donimo — only highlights the symptoms of what a doctor eventually diagnoses as early-onset Alzheimer’s.

And so this tale — as with so many others like it, in life and in film — can only go in one awfully sad direction, as the disease steadily erodes Midge’s memories, personality and sense of self, while her loved ones gradually lose the woman they know. Louis-Dreyfus beautifully voices Midge in all her sliding states of consciousness, from the bright, empathetic protector that Sarah returns to in her own childhood memories, to the fragile, angry woman railing against a deterioration that she can’t halt, to a foggy echo of her former self, sometimes recognizing the love surrounding her but not much else.

But for all the sorrow that marks and bruises “Tangles,” it’s not a depressing film — colored as it is by warmly detailed familial observation and bittersweet humor, as Midge’s daughters and husband slowly figure out how to keep living in the midst of her dying. The tone of proceedings largely follows the zigs and zags of Sarah’s own fraying mental health, sometimes plunging into nightmarish absurdism — an effective running gag sees the PA system on her many cross-country flights voicing her own more despairing thoughts — and sometimes breaking into practical clarity or wistful nostalgia. “Tangles” is a film sensitively but not blandly attuned to the challenges of living with dementia, as well as those living alongside it — and the stray, special moments of emotional connection between those struggles.