In her searing second feature, Mary Bronstein turns maternal stress into a claustrophobic psychodrama. Seemingly determined to make famously traumatic films such as Uncut Gems and After Hours look like an average episode of Ms Rachel, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You operates on the queasy register between nervous breakdown and paranoid delusion.
Are the apocalyptic home repairs merely a symptom of unreliable narrator Linda’s unease? When her husband finally appears, looking especially dashing in uniform, he seems to have walked out of the cockpit of an Airplane! movie. What is that?
At the feverish centre is Rose Byrne, giving a performance of extraordinary, sweat-slicked precision. Her Linda, a therapist adept at parsing other people’s anxieties, cannot contain her own escalating panic. The fraught mother’s long-suffering colleague (a deliciously against-type Conan O’Brien) ricochets between sympathy and smug detachment.
One half suspects that her daughter, who features as a disembodied voice for most of the film, may be a figment of Linda’s imagination. And then there’s the child’s mysterious illness.
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The relentless electronic chirrup from the patient’s feeding tube becomes a metronome of dread. By day, Linda lashes out at patients, school staff and anyone who dares offer guidance, registering the world as an assault course designed to expose her inadequacy. By night, she’s wine mom with a vengeance.
Chris Messina’s camera rarely pulls back, pinning Byrne (Oscar-nominated against Jessie Buckley for best actress and her only serious competitor) in suffocating close-up, so that we experience events as she does: breathless, cornered, perpetually on edge.
Authority figures begin to question her account of her daughter’s medical needs, nudging the film further into ambiguity. Even the solicitous motel receptionist, played with laid-back charm by A$AP Rocky, becomes another sounding board for her volatility.
[ Jessie Buckley is unbeatable at the Oscars. Unless this happensOpens in new window ]
When the long-absent spouse materialises, his crisp military bearing offers no relief. Byrne refuses to sand down Linda’s harsher edges, yet she reveals the raw terror beneath the fury. The result is a bruising character study that challenges the audience to sift genuine catastrophe from psychic projection. And here’s the kicker: to examine the elasticity of their own empathy.
In cinemas from February 20th
