‘If I Had Legs I might Kick You’ evaluate: Darkish psychodrama starring very good Byrne

From the second it begins, Mary Bronstein’s “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” goals to place you inside the pinnacle of a mom in disaster, and for the subsequent couple of hours it does so in such an exhausting, claustrophobic, anxiety-inducing method that, as you’re taking a journey on this cinematic endurance check, you’re feeling many issues: grudging admiration, abject terror and, lastly, candy aid when the closing credit roll.

Can a movie succeed too wildly in undertaking what it units out to do? By the film’s halfway level, when a sinister hamster exhibits up so as to add one other layer of torment to the lifetime of Linda (Rose Byrne), you would possibly assume sure. And guess what? At that time, there’s nonetheless one other hour to go of utmost close-ups, oppressive sound design and surreal pictures that might hold David Lynch awake at evening. If you happen to’re a girl and also you’re on the fence about turning into a mom, you would possibly by no means have intercourse once more.

The magic trick of “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” is that you end up caring deeply for Linda, because of Byrne’s vivid, impassioned efficiency. You’ll be able to’t shake her. Joyful as I used to be to be free from a film that at occasions felt tedious and suffocating, I believed so much about Linda for week after seeing it. Byrne’s work as a struggling girl worn down and on the verge of being erased by the pressures engulfing her is that magnificent.

“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” invitations comparisons to a different pressure-cooker image, the Safdie brothers’ 2019 adrenaline experience “Uncut Gems.” For starters, it’s produced by Josh Safdie and Bronstein’s husband, Ronald (himself a longtime Safdies collaborator), and shot by cinematographer Christopher Messina, the DP on the Safdies’ “Good Time.” It’s a group that has no qualms about aggressively pushing the bounds of its story in addition to the endurance of its viewers. It’s purposefully disagreeable. For Mary Bronstein, who wrote and directed the film, there’s no different method to make Linda’s annihilation really feel actual.

Actuality, although, is subjective right here. The film opens with a dialog between Linda and her unnamed daughter (Delaney Quinn), a younger lady whose face we by no means see, however whose anxious, insistent voice we hear continuously. “Mommy is stretchable,” the lady observes. Linda objects. She may be very a lot not stretchable, she argues. Additionally, she contends, she doesn’t get unhappy. Bronstein undercuts this assertion with a good close-up on Byrne that reveals the depths of her distress — additionally her pores.

The daughter suffers from a mysterious sickness that requires a feeding tube and the sort of hands-on care that understandably overwhelms Linda. She has little help from her AWOL husband, who calls in periodically, primarily to criticize, whereas away on a piece journey. Then the ceiling collapses — actually, producing a torrent of water crashing into their condo, a cascade possessing (roughly) the quantity and roar of Niagara Falls.

All of those horrible issues — the water, the injury, the gaping gap within the ceiling that looks like a portal into oblivion, the daughter’s neediness — would look like heightened manifestations of Linda’s fragile psychological state. Who is aware of, perhaps the daughter is a figment of her creativeness too, although I don’t assume the film helps such a studying. For one factor, her lady’s request to get a hamster and Linda’s weary appeasement simply rings all too true.

Bronstein populates the film with an offbeat set of supporting characters and her casting elevates each one in all them. When Linda and her daughter are compelled to relocate to a motel, she’s befriended by a neighbor (rapper ASAP Rocky) prepared to assist Linda on an escapist quest to grow to be greater than a wine mother. Conan O’Brien performs Linda’s exasperated therapist, by no means as soon as going for fun, which in itself is a part of the movie’s sharp-edged humor. And there’s Danielle Macdonald taking part in a mom much more troubled, who’s actually one in all Linda’s sufferers as a result of, sure, Linda is a therapist too and, from all proof, a reasonably good one.

Linda makes dozens of dangerous choices in “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” a lot of them seemingly indefensible till you notice that simply how totally remoted she feels. Abandonment runs rampant on this film. Linda simply needs somebody to inform her what to do or, on the very least, supply some assist. She finds solely chilly indifference, which, once more, could possibly be extra a product of her personal sense of alienation and desperation. I simply know that Bronstein calls for you take note of her, and with Byrne diving headfirst into the character’s harrowing panic, you will see that you don’t have any different alternative.