I had just reviewed one of my more anticipated films of the year from IFC, Mouse, starring Katherine Mallen Kupferer and Sophie Okonedo from the directors of Ghostlight, when I received access to another IFC feature, Tangles. As I mentioned in my review of Mouse, IFC has managed to top my best films of the year list for two consecutive years, with Ghostlight in 2024 and The Plague in 2025. And it looks like, although I still have a handful of movies I’m looking forward to, Tangles has a really good shot at giving IFC a three-peat. Which is so bizarre, considering IFC generally won’t give me the time of day, and I can never seem to get audio description with my screeners. So, yes, I sat through Tangles without audio description, and I still loved it. I think you have to be in the right headspace for this film, or have some sort of personal connection to the material, to truly be emotionally devastated by what it has to say about family, memories, aging, and a sense of duty. For me, that connection was absolutely there. I grew up as a theater kid and remain very much involved in live theater, so Ghostlight, which used theater as a way to process grief, was incredibly impactful. I also experienced bullying, so The Plague hit me exactly where it needed to. With Tangles, there were moments that spoke to me on an equally personal level. So indulge my slight spoilers here, because this is going to get personal.
But first, what on earth is Tangles? Directed by Leah Nelson in her feature debut, and adapted from Sarah Leavitt’s graphic memoir, Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me, this is an animated feature very much intended for an adult audience. It follows Sarah (Abbi Jacobson), a young woman whose career as an artist is finally starting to take off. She’s been working at a prominent LGBTQ magazine called Outspoken, where she’s beginning to get opportunities to contribute her illustrations. She also has a girlfriend, Donimo (Samira Wiley), and is starting to build a life for herself. However, Sarah remains close to her family, including her mother, Midge (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), her father, Rob (Bryan Cranston), and her sister, Hannah (Beanie Feldstein). Unfortunately, the family is approaching an impasse. Midge has lost her job, she’s experiencing mood swings, and she’s becoming increasingly scatterbrained, even by her own admission. For a while, the film becomes about Sarah’s concern for her mother and her determination to have her evaluated by a doctor, despite resistance from her parents. Rob even takes Midge on a trip to Mexico, seemingly believing that some sunshine and vitamin D might be the answer. Alternative medicine appears to be the preferred route, almost as though this couple knows what’s ahead of them and is trying to avoid hearing an official diagnosis. But Sarah remains persistent, and eventually Midge is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.
The haunting reality of a diagnosis like Alzheimer’s is that there is no cure. There are treatments intended to slow the progression in certain patients, and researchers continue developing medications in hopes of preserving memory and cognitive function for as long as possible. But the disease is progressive, and the devastating reality for Sarah’s family is that Midge is never going to be better than she is today. It’s an incredibly difficult concept to process, knowing that the person you love is going to continue slipping away from you, and there’s very little you can do to stop it. In Tangles, Midge’s condition is already progressing, and it becomes clear that the remainder of the film will be about her decline and the family’s attempts to navigate it. Sarah finds herself putting her own life on hold to step up and become a caregiver. Hannah offers to shoulder some of that responsibility, but she’s also navigating a new relationship with Zach (Seth Rogen), a goofy but well-meaning love interest who quickly becomes her fiancé. Rogen, who also serves as a producer, provides some welcome comic relief. There are other recognizable voices in smaller roles, including Pamela Adlon, Sarah Silverman, Wanda Sykes, and Bowen Yang. But this is ultimately a story about a mother and daughter, and you certainly don’t have to be either one to understand the emotional impact of watching someone who once cared for you suddenly need you to care for them. It’s that full-circle moment that so many families eventually experience, and Tangles captures it beautifully.
Just as Sarah’s career and romantic life are beginning to flourish, everything gets put on hold because her mother needs her. And at one point, Sarah expresses something that absolutely devastated me. She realizes that someday, probably sooner than she wants to believe, her mother will say her name for the last time. There will be a final moment when Midge recognizes her daughter, a final moment when she understands who Sarah is, and neither of them will necessarily know when that moment has arrived. Sarah realizes that her life is going to be filled with these last moments, and she wants to be present for all of them. That is such a profoundly heartbreaking realization, and the film doesn’t need to embellish it to make it resonate. Sarah also has a somewhat contentious relationship with her father, who is struggling with the same circumstances but processing them very differently. After something happens to Midge in the third act, Rob and Sarah have an argument in which Bryan Cranston delivers one of the most heartbreaking lines in the entire film. His performance is extraordinary, particularly because so much of Rob’s frustration comes from a place of helplessness. He cannot fix what is happening to his wife, and neither can his daughter. They’re both trying to do what they believe is right, even when that puts them at odds with each other.
This was an absolute emotional roller coaster for me, and I can’t imagine it won’t be for many of the people who watch it. Younger audiences may have grandparents experiencing something similar, while those of us around my age are reaching the point where our parents are entering the years when dementia, Alzheimer’s, and other age-related cognitive concerns become increasingly real possibilities. Suddenly, conversations about caregiving start to intertwine with our own plans for the future. I also wonder how this film will play for older audiences who see themselves represented through Midge and Rob, because it could serve as a frightening reminder of something that hasn’t happened to them yet. For me, though, this story was especially personal. Growing up, I helped care for my grandfather, who had dementia and Parkinson’s disease, and spent time in a nursing home. I was frequently recognized not as myself, but as my uncle. So when Sarah talks about wanting to be present for that final moment when her mother still recognizes her, I knew exactly what she meant. That line absolutely hit home. I’m also in the same general age bracket as Sarah, and I still have a parent alive who is in the age range where these diagnoses become more prevalent. So the reality of Tangles isn’t something I can simply observe from a distance. I can empathize with Sarah, but I can also transport myself into her position, projecting my own experiences and fears about the future onto what she’s going through. That made this an incredibly difficult film to watch, but also an incredibly rewarding one.
I genuinely struggle to understand how anyone could walk away from Tangles unmoved. I don’t understand the negative reviews at all. It’s mind-boggling to me, and part of me wants to question whether those critics have souls. Because there’s nothing here that feels overplayed, overbearing, or cloying. This isn’t a film that desperately tries to manipulate your emotions by throwing every possible tragedy at you. It takes the necessary route rather than offering some overembellished experience designed to wring tears out of its audience. In some ways, I actually thought the film could have gone further. But I also understand that some viewers check out when they feel a movie is being overly emotionally manipulative, and perhaps the restraint here is precisely what allows the material to work so effectively. I never felt manipulated by Tangles. I felt understood. There’s a significant difference. What Nelson has created is a portrait of a life interrupted, a future deferred, and a horrible disease responsible for slowly taking away someone who may have been the strongest person you’ve ever known. It strips away the memories, personality, and independence that make someone who they are, while leaving the people who love them struggling to preserve whatever remains. And yet, the film also understands that moments of humor, affection, and genuine happiness don’t simply disappear because someone is sick. Those moments become even more precious.
The animation itself is also an interesting choice, particularly because this is such an intimate and grounded story. Rather than trying to replicate the visual spectacle we’ve come to expect from mainstream animated features, Tangles uses a predominantly black-and-white, hand-drawn style that reflects its graphic memoir origins. It’s an approach that allows the film to explore memory and emotion in ways that live action might struggle to capture. I do wish I could have experienced the film with audio description, especially because I suspect there are visual details and stylistic decisions that would have deepened my appreciation of the material. If I had one nitpick, it would be that I didn’t entirely understand the decision to have Seth Rogen sing “I’ll Stand by You,” only for the film to return to the same song moments later in what sounded like a dance remix. I wasn’t entirely sure what connective tissue the filmmakers were trying to establish between those moments, or why we needed to hear the same song twice in such different contexts. Whatever the intention was, it was lost on me. Of course, that could very well be another consequence of not having audio description. The film has been made available with audio description for its theatrical release, but somehow that accessibility never seems to make its way to the screeners I receive. It’s frustrating, especially when a film is this good and I want to appreciate every element of it.
When I assemble my list of the best films of the year, I think about the movies that reached me, touched me, changed me in some way, or made me think and feel something I wasn’t necessarily expecting. Tangles does all of that. It’s a film I haven’t been able to stop thinking about, and I don’t imagine I will anytime soon. It’s also a film I cautiously, wholeheartedly recommend, with that caution coming only from the fact that I think some people may find it too emotionally overwhelming if they’re not in the right headspace. The voice performances from Abbi Jacobson, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Bryan Cranston all deserve recognition, and it would be an absolute crime if this movie weren’t nominated for Best Animated Feature at the Academy Awards. I know it’s a crowded year, but I would much rather see the animation branch take a swing at rewarding something this intimate, introspective, and emotionally resonant than automatically gravitate toward the fifth Toy Story movie that we didn’t need, or yet another Minions installment. Animation is a medium capable of telling so many different kinds of stories, and Tangles is a beautiful reminder that some of the most powerful ones don’t require a massive adventure, an elaborate fantasy world, or a franchise attached to them. Sometimes all you need is a family, a disease that changes everything, and the willingness to confront what that means.
If you get the opportunity to watch Tangles, and you feel emotionally prepared for what it’s about to do to you, please watch it. It’s beautiful. Cinema is supposed to impact us in some manner, whether that’s making us laugh uncontrollably, scaring us into submission, entertaining us long enough to forget the stress in our lives, or providing a cathartic experience that helps us process what we’re feeling and connect with something on a deeper emotional level. Tangles accomplishes that last goal in a way very few films manage. It reminded me of my grandfather, made me think about my surviving parent, and forced me to confront fears about aging, memory, responsibility, and the inevitability of loss. But it also reminded me how important it is to be present for the people we love while we still have them. I still have movies left to see in 2026, and I’m genuinely hoping I’ll be able to say that Tangles is the best film of the year. For now, I’ll settle for calling it one of the ten best films of 2026, because I’ve seen enough movies this year to feel confident that I’m not going to find ten better ones between now and December 31. If IFC manages to top my list for a third consecutive year, I suppose I’ll have to congratulate them again, even if they still won’t give me the time of day. But that’s a problem for another time. Right now, I’m just grateful that Tangles exists, and that I had the opportunity to experience it.
Fresh: 9.0/10
