Tangles and Knots
2018 · 16m · Australia
Directed by Renee Marie Petropoulos
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, family
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
The unique, intimate bond between a mother and her teenage daughter is threatened when the mother helps her daughter throw a party to impress new, more popular friends.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise reads like every Sundance dramedy about mother-daughter friction, but Petropoulos seems content to sit in the tenderness rather than subvert it—which is fine, just not the kind of risk that actually stays with you.
A formally assured coming-of-age that understands the grammar of intimate family cinema; the contemplative pacing and melancholic restraint position it firmly in the lineage of Greta Gerwig and Kelly Reichardt's quieter work.
The real film lives in how Petropoulos frames the party itself—not as spectacle but as the space where intimacy fractures—and that tonal choice, sustained across sixteen minutes with a skeleton crew, is what transforms a familiar premise into something that breathes.