Written and Directed by Mary Bronstein | 113 min | 113 min | ▲▲ | on VOD, Hoopla
The awards season is in full swing, and this movie — which I missed in theatres, it’s now available to rent — has been given a lot of approbation due to a rawer than raw performance from Rose Byrne.
She’s Linda, a psychotherapist who’s had to move into a dive motel with her daughter, who’s suffering from a disorder requiring a feeding tube, when their apartment is flooded by a pipe bursting through a huge hole in the ceiling. This while her husband (Christian Slater) is away for weeks working, offering no support over fraught phone calls. Linda’s colleague (Conan O’Brien), who provides therapy for her, is actively combative when he isn’t totally checked out. (O’Brien is a comedian and podcaster, not an actor — sometimes it’s hard to tell whether it’s his performance that’s the problem.)
In fact, almost all the men in the movie are deeply self-involved assholes who only barely listen to what Linda has to say, I’m sure a typical experience of many women in our ongoing patriarchal experiment, undermining Linda’s confidence as a mother. It doesn’t help that women in her life, including one of her daughter’s doctors and one of her patients, are either controlling or obsessed with her. This makes for a deeply anxiety-driven, claustrophobic picture, the script generating the occasional dry chuckle, with the camera focused on Byrne’s drawn face and hollow, sleepless eyes for a good two-thirds of the running time. Only another consistent presence at the motel, Jamie (A$AP Rocky), genuinely sees who she is, though his lifestyle isn’t necessarily encouraging her mental health.
The picture has room for moments of surreality — Linda hallucinates lights and voices in the hole in her ceiling — but it all comes back to her lingering guilt as a mother, unable to help her daughter and at times even resenting her. The daughter’s face is denied us for almost the whole running time, driving home the idea that Linda’s journey into paranoia and self-recrimination is all internal, with little hope for transmutation.
All to say, the film’s narrative beats and allegories are clear, but it’s a bleak, harrowing ride. Byrne’s intense dedication to Linda is its singular reward.
