The Tangle (2019)

directed by Christopher Soren Kelly

USA

99 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I've been really excited for this because I'm such a big fan of Christopher Soren Kelly and I'll watch anything he's in or that he directs. I'm saying all of this upfront because I'm very biased- this review isn't in any way objective, it's coming from somebody who was already pretty certain they would love this even if it technically was bad. That's how it is.

Probably the first and most apparent thing about this movie that most people will notice is that everybody talks REALLY weird. It's hard to describe, kind of a mixture of cyberpunk tech speak and a faux-1920s neo-noir hardboiled detective-type cadence without the transatlantic accent. The term "grok" is thrown around. All delivered perfectly deadpan. When people deliver their lines in this, you can really feel the script behind it, it's more like they're reading poetry or excerpts from a book than talking like real people talk. I don't think the actors were responsible for this; the whole thing was just written in such a very specific way that even if you had the best actors in the world doing this stuff it would still come out the same. Even Christopher Soren Kelly's character has that feeling and he's the one who wrote it all. You either like this or you don't, and if you don't, it will get on your nerves very quickly, because this is one of the talkiest films I've seen in recent memory and hardly a second goes by where someone is not jabbering. I personally was really into the bizarre speech patterns and anachronisms, but your mileage may vary.

Where this also might get some people is that it kind of mixes up the narrative progression, so certain things don't happen in a linear fashion. We're shown events, contextless, in the middle of the movie, and they might have happened days or weeks before the movie started or they might have happened just prior to it, and we don't really get any opportunity to piece this together for ourselves until a character explicitly figures it out. This, I can't say I enjoyed as much as the dialogue. It's a little confusing if you're actively trying to determine what goes where on a linear frame. So you have to just kind of go with it- you can have a loose idea of where the storyline is from where the characters are in the room, and any scenes where they're in different positions probably means the scene is from sometime in the past. But even that isn't always reliable. The Tangle really plays it fast and loose with time, to... interesting effect.

Also, for such a complex plot involving the interweaving of every human soul on Earth (literally, souls are an integral part of technology) in a web evolved from the present internet (which also still exists, but is viewed as somewhat outdated) called the Tangle, most of this takes place in one room. This is where Christopher Soren Kelly's talent as a screenwriter and director really comes through: he establishes this whole world through nothing but nonstop talking. None of the external scenes have that much to do with the worldbuilding, as they could have been cut from pretty much any generic sci-fi movie. What really makes this is how the characters talk amongst themselves about the concepts the film centers on. "Amongst themselves" is a key phrase in recognizing why this film is so good at development: there had to be a happy medium between explaining important details about the world to the viewers while also establishing that this world was something the characters were used to living in. If somebody gives unnecessary background about things that they're supposed to already be familiar with- like, if I explained how Apple was founded every time I talked about calling somebody on my iPhone- it takes you out of the flow of things. So the fact that the dialogue in this movie was able to develop a world without making us feel like the world was still in development is impressive.

Again, the biggest con with this is that it's fairly impenetrable if you care about actually trying to figure out what's going on while it's going on. If you can sit back without engaging and stop trying to follow threads that are just confusing and will ultimately not lead you anywhere, because you don't have all the information yet, this won't frustrate you. And you'll be able to see how good this movie really is. It's very, very dialogue-driven, and its toolset is sparse, but I think it does a lot with what it has and I found it very original and enjoyable.