Tangles Review: A Slick Alzheimer's Drama That Leaves You Cold

By Marcus Bennett

Tangles, the animated Alzheimer's drama that screened at the 2026 AFI Fest, will receive an awards-qualifying run beginning November 27 at IFC Center before opening on January 15. The film is polished, funny and sensitive. It is also, according to the review that follows from its festival premiere, overly familiar.

The opening is the kind of heartwarming introduction to a fearless mother that would not be out of place in a Pixar film. Midge, voiced by 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 this is not a children's movie. An adult Sarah (Abbi Jacobson) receives her first magazine assignment: illustrating a sultry two-page spread featuring woman-on-woman sex.

High off the big break, Sarah heads to a nightclub, where she meets and hooks up with the mysterious biker Donimo (Samira Wiley). The name, she learns, is like "Geronimo," not Domino.

What disrupts Sarah's ascent?

Her rise pauses the next morning, when she flies cross-country to visit her family in Maine. The film's most honest moments come from the specificity of that family. Midge sings a cappella with her two sisters (Sarah Silverman and Pamela Adlon) in the living room. Sarah feels embarrassed relaying the scene by phone to the ultra-cool Donimo, but her affection for her family's quirks wins out. Her family is just odd like that, she concludes with a smile.

The comfort of home cracks when Sarah notices her mother's uncharacteristic blankness and irritability. The family dismisses her pleas, chalking the behavior up to run-of-the-mill menopause. Then comes the Alzheimer's diagnosis. The central tension emerges: Sarah must balance her growing workload, which now includes animating magazine covers, 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 supply an amusing recurring bit. Increasingly surreal PA announcements jab at Sarah's anxieties and deteriorating state of mind.

What works on the craft level?

Plenty. The film is consummately produced, with a keen sense of how to balance humor with sensitive subject matter, and it 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 something is missing. A young adult on the cusp of getting life in order while grappling with a parent's declining health is hardly unfamiliar territory, and Tangles does little to distinguish itself from the many films that precede it. The messiness of Sarah's unraveling life plays as tidy within a tightly plotted three-act structure.

What does Rogen's hand-drawn promise deliver?

Producer and star Seth Rogen highlighted the film's hand-drawn animation in his introduction at AFI Fest last weekend. The craft impresses, but the promised texture only appears in small doses: Sarah's squiggly glasses, the simulated flecks of film-reel dust during the plane sequences. An overwhelming slickness, across both the creative and the narrative, leads to a work that plays like a commercial rather than one simply striving to be commercial.

The verdict is damning in its restraint: a film that makes no obvious mistakes, yet ultimately leaves you feeling so little. Whether awards voters reward that polish — or notice the hollowness beneath it — will shape the film's fate when it opens January 15.