If I Had Legs I'd Kick You

In an age where life’s everyday challenges can test our wits, becoming overwhelmed is a real possibility when they pile up. Just ask Linda (Rose Byrne), a therapist who struggles to sincerely and sensitively assist her troubled patients. But that’s just the start of her problems. She’s also tending to a sick child (Delaney Quinn), the demands of which are considerable, both from the whiny, often-unappreciative youngster and her annoyingly insistent caregivers. To make matters worse, a burst pipe in the ceiling of her apartment has forced mother and child to move into a hotel, a stay that’s become unexpectedly extended due to the lack of repair work by her inattentive landlord. And, through all of these ordeals, Linda is on her own, given that her unfeeling husband (Christian Slater) is frequently away on business. As a consequence, this palette of issues has forced Linda into therapy herself with a peer counselor (Conan O”Brien), whose incessant indifference not only offers little help, but also tends to exacerbate the stress in her life. Over time, the specific pressures associated with each of these incidents begin to snowball, making coping nearly impossible. And, as time passes, Linda feels as though she’s losing herself and descending into her own personal madness. So what is she to do? That’s what this intense offering from actress-writer-director Mary Bronstein seeks to explore. This exceedingly dark comedy-drama examines what a woman on the edge might go through as the breaking point approaches. There’s an undeniably raw, edgy, realistic quality to this release, one that sometimes makes this a decidedly uncomfortable watch. The barrage of challenges to simply get through the day keeps coming at the protagonist (and, hence, viewers) relentlessly, presented here in nonstop fashion at breakneck speed. And it seems that, no matter what good faith efforts Linda makes to resolve her dilemmas, they’re never enough, often exposing her to petty, undue criticism that,...

Rose Byrne turns in a terrific performance here, but I found the thrust of the plot to be just a bit too much like a contrived horror movie. She is “Linda”, a therapist whose husband is off piloting a boat and whose un-named daughter has some form of undefined illness that is putting huge pressure on her mother. Then, just to add to her woes, a water leak in their apartment turns her ceiling into a Swiss cheese and forces them to take refuge in a rather basic motel. With the sounds of the child’s feeding machine never far from her dreams, “Linda” heads firmly into the realms of a sleep-deprived and booze-induced nervous breakdown that her own psychiatrist (Conan O’Brien) is unable to help with. She is steadily losing the plot, and so are we. Just what is going on with the woman, and with her faceless offspring? At times this is quite an intensely written and potent observation of mental stress and Byrne really does manage to convey her character’s increasing hysteria quite compellingly, but there are too many pieces of the puzzle missing for us to make any meaningful assessment or to do really much more than recoil from her predicament. A little sense of the proceedings is made right at the very end, but by then I had become too lost, and actually disinterested, in it’s maelstrom of despair. The film does convey quite a powerful message about the importance of listening, and of the frustrations and dangers of not listening, but too many of the ancillary characters are either absent, undercooked or just simplistically portrayed - personally or via the telephone, as little more than excuses for her character to present us with someone ostensibly abandoned by those who might and should want to care for her. In the end it came down to a lack of plausibility for me as it built to a conclusion that became a little more expected as we got to know more about “Linda”. It is worth a look, but really only for a Byrne at the top of her game.

With truly sincere apologies to Almodóvar, the alternate title to this film could be "Woman in the Throes of a Nervous Breakdown." Mary Bronstein's debut feature captures the absolute insanity of raising a child in this time and place with such visceral precision that watching it feels less like cinema and more like surviving someone else's panic attack in real time.

Rose Byrne plays Linda, a therapist whose life is disintegrating on every front: a child with a mysterious illness requiring a feeding tube, an absent husband, a missing person case, and her own increasingly hostile therapy sessions with a colleague played by Conan O'Brien. Byrne is so devastatingly good in this role that it becomes genuinely difficult to tell if she's acting or actually stuck in the situation. Every frayed nerve, every moment of barely controlled hysteria, every attempt to hold it together while everything falls apart feels utterly, uncomfortably real. This is fearless work, the kind of performance that makes you wonder what it costs to go to those places.

The soundtrack and sound design, crafted by Filipe Messeder with re-mixing by Ruy Garcia, function as the film's true co-star. This is genuinely unique and original work; Bronstein and her sound team use audio not just to underscore Linda's mental state but to replicate it. The soundscape becomes oppressive, intrusive, relentless in ways that mirror the demands of parenthood, the medical system, professional obligations, the voice in your head telling you you're failing at everything simultaneously. It's brilliant, suffocating filmmaking.

There's a pointed meta-story here about therapists being unable to manage their own children and lives, about the particular irony of spending your professional life helping others navigate crisis while drowning in your own. Linda dispenses wisdom she can't apply, maintains boundaries she can't sustain, performs competence while unraveling. It's a sharp observation about the helping profess...