FILM OF THE WEEK: If I Had Legs I'd Kick You - Reviewed by Roe McDermott

I hope that the Bronstein’s home is calmer than their films. Director Mary Bronstein is married to Ronald Bronstein, co-writer and editor of Safdie brother creations Good Time and Uncut Gems. The couple seem to share a love of inducing brilliantly realised and unrelenting stress in their audiences. If Uncut Gems brought us into an adrenaline-fuelled, masculine world of betting, money, sports, sex and violence,  If I Had Legs I’d Kick You brings us into a world of motherhood, caretaking, domestic management, emotional labour, endless clawing demands - and an oppressive amount of guilt.

Bronstein’s opening immerses us in Linda’s world – and the director's style. It begins with a close up of Rose Byrne’s face, allowing us to see every micro-expression, every twitch irritation, every forced smile, every shine brewing in her eyes, and every moment of emotional flattening. We hear - but don’t see - a patronising therapist, discussing their treatment of Linda’s daughter, who has food issues and a feeding tube that Linda wants to have removed. This technique of letting us hear the people in Linda’s world but not see them continues throughout the movie – most noticeably with Linda’s daughter, who persists as an unnamed, disembodied, whining, histrionic, demanding voice. Hearing but not seeing Linda’s daughter diminishes sympathy for this small, ill child, while simultaneously preventing us from blaming her.

This is not The Babadook, where a mother’s struggle becomes almost viscerally marked onto a constantly screaming child. Instead, this decision immerses us in Linda’s emotional climate, where her daughter becomes one of the never-ending demands on Linda – and there are many.

A flood has left Linda’s apartment uninhabitable, with a giant, gaping hole in the ceiling which comes to feel like a cosmic, existential void. Her contractor ignores her calls while she lives in a dingy hotel room. Her daughter’s specialists ignore her wishes and criticise her parenting. Her husband is travelling for work, calling her from pockets of free time she has no concept of. A parking lot nemesis won’t let her drop off her daughter at school without banging on her car window. And Linda’s day-job is as a therapist, attending to needy clients she’s too burned out to convey empathy for.

Linda is under siege, unravelling, and Bronstein’s camera remains on Linda almost constantly, forcing us to endure every exhausting moment with her. This is motherhood, Bronstein says. Dare to tell me this isn’t the most stressful psychological thriller you’ve ever seen.

Rose Byrne, finally getting recognition for her years of excellence across genres, is remarkable here, fully earning her recent Oscar nomination. Linda moves between slightly manic, high-pitched, forced expressions of reassurance to her daughter, her husband, her daughter’s medical team; and the flattened, contempt-filled expression of someone who has nothing left to give. At night, she drinks, allowing herself to blur and haze, her expression softening but in a way that feels like annihilation rather than escape.

Anytime Linda is not actively speaking, her phone or a medical device is beeping – a subtle sonic cue that keeps our adrenalin constantly spiking. A pulsating, haunting score emphasizes this unease, particularly as Linda obsessively returns to look at the hole in her ceiling, which also haunts her dreams, its increasingly surreal pull becoming a symbol of her rapidly decaying sanity.

The supporting cast are also fantastic, with Conan O’Brien playing against type as a dismissive therapist, another man in Linda’s life who can’t hear her; A$AP Rocky as James, a calm and alleviating motel worker who brings some grounding to her – until that also goes awry. Patti Cake$’ Danielle Mcdonald plays an anxiety-riddled woman going to Linda for counselling, acting as another portrait of a woman crumbling under the pressures of motherhood.

This is the real horror of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, which sits alongside other recent films and shows exploring how society has turned motherhood into an oppressive structure quietly devouring women’s time, ambition and sanity – Nightbitch, Die My Love, Fleischman Is In Trouble, Tully, The Babadook. Where Uncut Gems created a film where our bodies clenched and heart-rate spiked as we watched a man self-destruct through his own decisions, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You creates the same embodied stress response – but also brings with it a bracing an necessary dose of guilt, and complicity. Linda isn’t breaking because of what she’s doing to herself. She’s breaking because of what we as a society are doing to her, and what we do to so many mothers: dismiss them, ignore them, make demands on them, and offer no meaningful support. That feeling is deeply uncomfortable, which is perhaps why many audience members who embrace other films of emotional intensity and discomfort are describing the layered and stylistically accomplished film as overwhelming – if we feel it, we have to wrestle with that, and do better.

Written and director, writer: Mary Bronstein. Cinematography by Christopher Messina. Edited by Lucian Johnston. Starring Rose Byrne, Delaney Quinn, Mary Bronstein, A$AP Rocky, Mark Stolzenberg, Conan O'Brien, Danielle Macdonald. 113 mins

• In cinemas now. Watch the trailer below: