The opening of animated feature Tangles is the type of heartwarming introduction to a fearless mother that would not be out of place in a Pixar film. Midge (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) enters her daughter Sarah’s bedroom, wielding a flashlight as a makeshift lightsaber to ward off shadowy monsters in the wallpaper. A quick time jump to 1999 in San Francisco makes clear that this is not a children’s movie. At work, a now-adult Sarah (Abbi Jacobson) is granted her first magazine assignment in illustrating a sultry two-page spread featuring all manner of woman-on-woman sex. High off this big break, Sarah heads to a nightclub that evening, where she meets and hooks up with the mysterious biker Donimo (Samira Wiley), a name she learns is like “Geronimo” and not Domino.
Sarah’s ascent toward conquering her young adult life in San Francisco comes to a quick pause when she travels cross-country the next morning to visit her family in Maine. The film’s most honest moments come from the specificity of Sarah’s family. When Midge sings a cappella with her two sisters (Sarah Silverman and Pamela Adlon) in the living room, Sarah might instinctively feel embarrassed while relaying the scene over the phone to the ultra-cool Donimo, but her immense affection for her family’s quirks wins out. Her family is just odd like that, she concludes with a smile.
The comfort of home is disrupted by Sarah’s concerns over her mother’s uncharacteristic moments of blankness and irritability. The family dismisses her pleas to take these changes more seriously, chalking Midge’s behavior up to run-of-the-mill menopause. When Midge is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, the central narrative tension emerges: Sarah must balance her growing workload, which now includes animating covers for the magazine, and her budding relationship with Donimo on the West Coast against the emotionally taxing care her mother requires on the East Coast. The frequent flights between San Francisco and Maine provide an amusing recurring bit in which increasingly surreal PA announcements make comical jabs at Sarah’s anxieties and deteriorating state of mind.
Consummately produced, with a keen sense of how to balance humor with sensitive subject matter, Tangles goes down easy. Abstract bursts of animation that externalize Sarah’s inner anxieties are visually stunning. The all-star voice cast, including Bryan Cranston as the father, play off each other well.
Yet it’s difficult to shake the feeling that something is missing. A story featuring a young adult on the cusp of getting their own life in order while also grappling with a parent’s declining health is hardly unfamiliar territory, and Tangles does little to distinguish it from the many films that precede it. The messiness of Sarah’s unraveling life plays as tidy within Tangles’ tightly plotted three-act structure.
Producer and star Seth Rogen highlighted the film’s hand-drawn animation in his introduction at AFI Fest last weekend, and while the craft impresses, the texture one might expect from Rogen’s promise only appears in small doses, whether glimpsed in Sarah’s squiggly glasses or in the simulated flecks of film-reel dust that appear during the plane sequences. An overwhelming slickness, across both the creative and narrative, leads to a work that more closely hews toward playing like a commercial rather than one that is simply striving to be commercial. It can be difficult to account for a film like Tangles, which makes no obvious mistakes, yet ultimately leaves you feeling so little.
Tangles screened at the 2026 AFI Fest and will receive an awards-qualifying run beginning November 27 at IFC Center before opening on January 15.
