If I Had Legs I’d Kick You review – Rose Byrne is tremendous therapist in meltdown in pitch-black horror-comedy

Byrne delivers a barnstorming performance as a shrink – counselled by an impatient Conan O’Brien – being pushed to the edge by stress of parenting Here is a psychological horror-comedy of postnatal depression and lonely parental stress, like a flip-side to Eraserhead or Rosemary’s Baby; it’s a scary movie with a heroine shot almost solely in looming closeup – but instead of supernatural apparitions, there are simply the banal problems of childcare and no time to deal with them. It’s also a film about therapy and transference when there’s nothing left to transfer. Mary Bronstein is its writer-director, and her film-maker husband Ronald Bronstein serves as producer – as does Josh Safdie, whose influence, through movies such as Uncut Gems and Marty Supreme, can perhaps be detected in the sprint towards a nervous breakdown. Rose Byrne delivers a barnstormer as Linda, a psychotherapist whose husband is away, leaving her to deal with a sick infant daughter whose face is not shown until the very end, indicating perhaps the way in which the little girl’s identity is simply that of a gigantically blank all-pervasive problem to be managed. The girl is intubated via a feeding machine that must be carted around with her, especially to the day-care hospital whose brusque doctor in charge (played by Mary Bronstein in cameo) supervises group therapy sessions that blandly reassure the parents present that all this is not their fault, while curtly reprimanding Linda for her failure to turn up to appointments and to discuss her daughter’s failure to gain the weight necessary for the tube to be removed. Continue reading...

By Peter Bradshaw