Presented as a Special Screening at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, Tangles adapts Sarah Leavitt’s autobiographical graphic memoir into an animated feature where black-and-white linework becomes a tool of memory. The film follows Sarah, an activist artist in 1990s San Francisco, called back to her family when Alzheimer’s disease begins to transform her mother.
1. What Kind of Spotlight Does the Film Step Into?
Tangles moves through rare material: illness, yes, but above all everything it unsettles around it. Sarah’s trajectory is not only that of a daughter returning to her mother’s bedside; it is that of a young woman trying to hold together her art, her desire, her family, her anger, and her fear.
Leah Nelson works in black and white, close to Sarah Leavitt’s original drawing style, with bursts of color reserved for precise emotional moments. In this kind of story, the line trembles more accurately than a long medical speech: it frames a face, then already lets it drift a little.
2. What the Film Tells, Without Giving the Game Away
At first, Sarah believes she can organize the situation the way one tidies a table, a schedule, a pile of drawings. Very quickly, the film shifts the problem: it is not about “managing” Alzheimer’s, but about learning to live inside its disorder.
The illness redistributes family roles, places the father Rob face-to-face with exhaustion, forces the sister Hannah to find her own place, and splits Sarah between two lives: the one she is building far from home and the one calling her back.
3. Characters and Cast
Sarah, voiced by Abbi Jacobson, is the film’s exposed nerve: an artist, a lesbian, an activist, funny, sometimes abrupt, with a way of turning anxiety into action. Her dramatic function lies in that friction: she wants to help, but her need for control becomes a knot of its own.
Midge, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, is the emotional center of the story. The film does not reduce her to her diagnosis: it first presents her as a woman of wit, language, tenderness, and sharp timing, then observes how the illness changes the flow of those qualities without erasing them all at once.
Rob, entrusted to Bryan Cranston, embodies another way of loving: holding on, minimizing, patching things together, acting as if the house could still absorb the catastrophe. Hannah, played by Beanie Feldstein, brings a valuable line of sibling tension. Donimo, played by Samira Wiley, opens the film toward a love story told as an ordinary, vivid, and necessary part of Sarah’s life.
4. Dialogue
The dialogue in Tangles has something deeply domestic about it: people talk fast, joke so they do not crack, interrupt each other, and circle around dangerous words. Humor does not cancel out pain; sometimes it serves as a crutch, like those airplane announcements that become inner commentaries.
5. Sound and Music
The music is by Dan Romer. In an animated film, sound plays an essential role here: the more the drawing simplifies faces, the more the voices, household noises, phone messages, and breathing make the world concrete.
6. Direction
The strongest choice is to remain within Sarah’s gaze rather than enter Midge’s mind. This refusal of the “sick person’s point of view” avoids the feeling of demonstration. Instead, the film observes the effects of Alzheimer’s on an ecosystem: the bedroom, the kitchen, the car rides, the parental couple, the sister, the romantic relationship, the artistic work.
The black-and-white animation maintains the connection with the graphic memoir. When touches of color appear, they become overflows: not pretty ornaments, but emotional signals. Drawing, here, means holding on to what is slipping away.
7. A Line to Remember
“Sometimes you have to be brave for others.”
This sentence sums up, without underlining it, one of the film’s threads: courage is not always spectacular. Sometimes it simply means staying in the room.
8. Who Is It For?
Tangles may speak to viewers looking for adult animation that is intimate, closer to a notebook than to a spectacular fable. The film is especially aimed at those who know family caregiving, neurodegenerative diseases, forced returns to the family home, or that very precise feeling of having a life of your own at the exact moment when your family calls you back.
It may also resonate with an audience drawn to queer stories where identity is not treated as a problem to solve, but as a way of inhabiting the world. Here, love, drawing, anger, and grief cross paths without asking permission.
Essential Information
- Original title: Tangles
- French title: Tangles
- Directed by: Leah Nelson
- Screenplay: Leah Nelson, Sarah Leavitt, Trev Renney
- Based on: Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me, the graphic memoir by Sarah Leavitt
- Voice cast: Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Abbi Jacobson, Bryan Cranston, Beanie Feldstein, Seth Rogen, Samira Wiley, Pamela Adlon, Sarah Silverman, Bowen Yang, Wanda Sykes
- Main characters: Midge, Sarah, Rob, Hannah, Zach, Donimo
- Music: Dan Romer
- Countries: Canada, United States
- Runtime: 102 minutes
- Festival: Special Screening, 2026 Cannes Film Festival
- International sales: Charades
