If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

When the credits rolled on “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” I noticed that Josh Safdie, of the erstwhile Safdie Brothers, served as one of the producers. That felt right to me because the preceding 114 minutes felt like an unrelenting, claustrophobic, close-up heavy Safdie-like joint. That is not to divest writer/director Mary Bronstein of her auteurist imprint. Bronstein made “Yeast” in 2008, back when the Safdies were just starting out, and it, too, was an unrelenting, claustrophobic, close-up heavy joint. I say all this to contextualize what you go through in watching “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” which is not about addicts, or petty criminals, or a fanatical table tennis player, but a mother, the hardest job in the world. That’s sort of what Bronstein’s movie is, a dramatic thriller about motherhood, starring Rose Byrne as Linda, taking care of a young daughter with a feeding disorder that necessitates virtual round-the-clock care. Bronstein chooses never to show Linda’s daughter in a full shot, reducing her almost entirely to a voice. That choice is disorienting and effective, as if taking the notion of an unbreakable bond between mother and daughter and shattering it, amplified through the frequently intense close-ups of Linda and the cacophonous, unrelenting sound of her daughter’s voice, evoking the strange feeling of loneliness that comes on from never ever having the chance to be alone.

Linda is virtually on her own as a caretaker because her husband Charles is a ship captain who is always away at sea. Stop and think about that for a second. It’s funny, albeit in the darkest way possible and as such, indicative of the darkly comical coursing through “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” one furthered in Linda’s occupation as a therapist, dispensing psychoanalysis even as both the script and Byrne cultivate the air of someone who looks like she’s on the couch even while she’s in the chair. She finds herself treating a new mother, Caroline (Danielle Macdonald), suffering from postpartum depression and an absent husband, and who thinks Linda is failing to meet her needs just as Linda herself receives treatment from a colleague (Conan O’Brien) who she is convinced is failing to meet her needs. A rare foray into legitimate acting, O’Brien is quite good, though in so many ways, Bronstein helps to sculpt his performance. By yoking the movie so resolutely to Linda’s point-of-view, it is difficult to surmise her reliability as a narrator, and how much her colleague’s brusque, even dismissive, attitude is the reality of what is occurring of merely her perception. “What is it you’re so sure I can’t help you with?” he asks at one point, a breathtaking moment that feels like a moment where we might be seeing him unadorned…but we can’t be sure.

That unreliability extends to the hole that opens in the ceiling of Linda’s apartment, flooding the place, and forcing her and her daughter to evacuate to a seedy motel. She keeps returning to the apartment, anyway, transfixed by the hole, and whether this is pure symbolism or something more supernatural is a question that Bronstein is content to leave unexplained. Those dueling sensations coalesce in Byrne’s mesmerizing turn, in equal measure conveying realism and madness, comedy and horror, and inviting as much disdain as empathy; you don’t necessarily like the destructive decisions she’s making even if you understand why she’s making them. Whether you take the conclusion to be real or imaginary, it can’t help but feel telegraphed, from a thousand movies before it as much as “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” nodding toward it the whole way. It also doesn’t much matter because Byrne sweeps you up and carries you along, making it feel as if Linda herself is being swept along by some unstoppable current, increasingly unable to fight against it, as if no longer living life but left wholly at its mercy.