Tangles

Leah Nelson’s animated feature debut Tangles approaches early-onset Alzheimer’s with an honesty that is often difficult to sit through and all the more affecting because of it. Adapted from Sarah Leavitt’s graphic memoir Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me, the picture follows Sarah (Abbi Jacobson), an artist and activist living in late-90s San Francisco whose life is abruptly derailed when her mother Midge (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at just 55 years old. After months of increasingly strange behaviour – initially brushed aside as menopause – Sarah leaves behind her colourful life in California and a budding romance with Donimo (Samira Wiley), to return to her childhood home in a small town.

Like Leavitt’s memoir, the film is largely shot in black and white, and Nelson uses the monochrome animation to remarkable effect. The visual style is understated, though the frames remain visually dense, shifting between domestic realism and darker, expressionistic moments. A frightening sequence set during a Day of the Dead parade becomes almost horror-like in its distorted imagery and claustrophobic movement – vivid colour punctuating the monochrome to striking effect – while Sarah’s dreams and fantasies bleed into reality as their aesthetic ties neatly into her work as an artist, making the story feel like an extension of her inner world.

The artistry is striking, but what truly lingers is the feature’s clear-eyed portrayal of degenerative illness and the strain of caregiving. Sarah’s father Rob (Bryan Cranston) and younger sister Hannah (Beanie Feldstein) initially appear to retreat into denial even after the diagnosis, clinging to routine and optimism as Midge’s condition worsens. Sarah herself struggles with the resentment and guilt that come with placing her own life on hold. Nelson does not soften those emotions into something more comforting or inspirational; instead, the picture lingers on the exhaustion, frustration and quiet humiliations that often accompany long-term care.

Animation proves an especially effective medium for this material because it allows the film to confront the most distressing realities of Alzheimer’s without reducing them to spectacle. The focus never drifts towards the physical shock of illness itself, but remains fixed on the sadness, discomfort and disorientation surrounding it. For all its visual experimentation, the feature’s heart lies in the ordinary details of decline and caregiving that slowly accumulate over time, and despite its dark visual style and flashes of bleak humour, Tangles remains unexpectedly tender.