Mary Bronstein’s second film, and her first in seventeen years, following 2008’s Yeast, is a vision of parenthood, especially motherhood, as a fugue state, a fever dream that collapses and absorbs reality. Rose Byrne plays Linda, mother of a young girl who is never named, played by Delaney Quinn, who suffers from an eating disorder in which she is unwilling to consume anything by mouth. As a result, she has to be hooked up to a feeding machine, which introduces vitamins and nutrients intravenously. As if that weren’t stressful enough, Linda’s husband, Charles, played by Christian Slater, is a ship captain, and is away on an eight week trip right when their daughter’s eating disorder reaches a crisis point. On top of all that, the ceiling of their bedroom collapses suddenly, forcing Linda to seek refuge in a motel, as a dallying landlord and inefficient repair company endlessly delay fixing the damage. Meanwhile, she’s trying to juggle her work as a psychotherapist for people who are every bit as stressed as she is, while making futile attempts to find catharsis in her sessions with her own therapist, also unnamed, but played by Conan O’Brien, who works in the same building. The closest she comes to normal human connection is James, the motel superintendent, played by ASAP Rocky, but even this relationship is fractured and fleeting.
Those different pressures take Bronstein’s film beyond mere melodrama to a unique fusion of cosmic horror and body horror. We see the body horror in the recurring motif of the daughter remaining attached to the feeding tube, a surrogate for the umbilical cord that Linda is never able to quit. We never see the daughter’s face, enhancing the feeling that she is still in some sense in the womb, not fully delivered. The opening words of the film are the daughter reflecting that “Mommy is stretchable” – and from thereon out Linda’s body is pulled in an unbearable number of directions at once, making for what must have been an emotionally exhausting and physically punishing performance for Byrne in the lead role. In terms of cosmic horror, the hole in Linda’s ceiling quickly takes on otherworldly dimensions, as the camera continually returns to it and pans up into its traumatic void, where fragments of sound, light and memory turn it into a black hole of anxiety and apprehension. Likewise, Linda’s gaze is always directed upwards, usually in fear, as if the hole has made her aware that she’s never sufficiently on top of things for true catharsis to occur, even when she’s bathed in the twinkling stars from the motel carpark. As the film proceeds, these body and cosmic dimensions converge, just as the celestial hole becomes synonymous with the unimaginable depths of the feeding tube snaking and winding its way through the daughter’s body. The most Linda can hope for that her strategic “breathwork” will allow her to snatch moments of fleeting respite from the existential pressures caving in upon her.
In this way, Bronstein seems to be crafting something analogous to Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Both films are studies in the temporality of femininity and motherhood, but where Akerman focuses on evacuated time, Bronstein is interested in cluttered time – specifically, the cluttered time of the contemporary world, where mothers are held to impossibly high standards due to the rise of the trad wife and the glut of mommy influencers. During the opening credits, we hear Linda reflect on her experience of time as a series of hurdles and as the film unfolds, time often feels like something that has been weaponised against her, an enemy too existential to be successfully combated. On one of her first nights in the motel, a woman at a convenience store arbitrarily decides not to sell her alcohol, despite the fact that she has two minutes before the cut-off point at 2am. In one of her first therapy sessions, she doesn’t receive the obligatory ten-minute “warning time” at the end of the hour, leaving her hanging with unfinished business. And, as the film proceeds, she finds it increasingly difficult to discern the date, the time, or whether it is even day or night, morning or evening.
Like time, space dissolves around Linda’s experience of motherhood – especially the space of traditional bourgeois domesticity, which we only glimpse briefly before the void in the ceiling flings Linda and her daughter into the motel, which itself feels jettisoned into outer space. Not only does the lighting scheme of the motel work against clear thresholds but it doesn’t overtly prioritise white skin; if anything, the lurid fluorescence, and the pervasive edge of darkness, works to draw out the luminosity of black skin, that of ASAP Rocky’s character in particular, further flinging Linda to the margins of her everyday life, especially once she starts investigating the dark web with the motel superintendent, surfing the most obscure corners of the internet beneath the brightest halogen lights in the film. We see the same spatial disorientation in her work life – it’s only about halfway through the film that we realise that she and her therapist operate out of the same office and are only down the hallway from each other; their respective sessions seem to emanate from different galaxies. This spatial breakdown means that If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is only ever a few beats away from the Insidious universe that catapulted Byrne to American stardom – specifically, “the Further,” the supernatural otherworld within the franchise that functions as a distorted counterpart to our everyday domestic lives. Bronstein’s film often lapses over into horror, as the ceiling hole expands beyond the house to haunt Linda’s dreams and leave a variety of lurid mother-daughter broadcasts in its wake: a late-night horror film about mothers eating their kids, a breaking news story on a babysitter who killed both children in her care, a Donahue special about whether mothers are destined to continue their mothers’ mistakes.
This is a film, then, that builds by spatiotemporally dissociating, suspending us in the ever-escalating elasticity or “stretchiness” between Linda’s body, Linda’s daughter, and Linda’s home, itself splintered into the connective tissue between motel and house, which she traverses in increasingly erratic and unpredictable ways. An ambient viscosity is always threatening to overwhelm her, as if the amniotic fluid has returned to her womb and is gradually rising in her body until it silences, blinds and kills her. Bronstein captures this process through dissonant and disorienting cuts (we’ll shift quite suddenly, for example, from Linda being locked out of her motel apartment to being in the midst of a therapy session) as microsleeps puncture and fracture the texture of life from somewhere just below the threshold of consciousness. Beyond a certain point it’s impossible to situate Linda in any discrete space or at any specific time of day, especially because the omnipresent red light of her daughter’s feeding machine always offsets the artificial or natural light of the scene, much as the 24-hour requirements of the device erode conventional diurnality.
With everything condensed to a crisis point, every relationship in Linda’s life is refracted through, and distorts in turn, the mother-child relationship, spilling out into endlessly fractallating patterns of infantile dependency, childlike appeals to authority, and surrogate parental responsibilities. This is particularly evident in Linda’s therapeutic practice, where patients become a different kind of child. One patient is upset to learn that Linda isn’t always thinking about her; another insists that “This is my time. She’s mine now.” The most demanding patient, Caroline, played by Danielle McDonald, goes so far as to leave her own baby with Linda, during a therapy session, and then promptly vanishes for a couple of days, before turning up to Linda’s motel room late at night in need of attention. Yet Linda is also reduced to this childlike dependency herself, whether it’s screaming at her therapist in desperation, and demanding to know whether he has kids, to leaving apparently endless voicemail messages for her husband and then abruptly dissociating midway through them.
Bronstein doesn’t offer any easy answers to this scenario. We get a glimpse of two more conventional endings in the latter part of the film – first, when Linda suggests that “I’m one of those people who’s not supposed to be a Mom. This isn’t it. It can’t be” and, second, when her therapist speaks firmly to one of Linda’s patients, who turns up and demands a session right after Danielle has left the baby: “Make a choice.” These two solutions – that some people shouldn’t have kids, and that kids only need firm boundaries – are familiar from popular culture, but in Bronstein’s vision parenthood is too cosmic and amorphous to admit of these trite answers. Insofar as Linda has a real nemesis, it comes in the form of the medical establishment who moralises her failings as a parent, specifically a doctor, played by Bronstein herself, who repeatedly implies that Linda shouldn’t have become a parent, or only needs to set clear limits to succeed. By contrast, the closing act extends the fluid spatiotemporality of the film both inwards and outwards. The climax comes when Linda finally pulls the (seemingly endless) tube out of her daughter’s stomach. As liquid pools in her belly button, and her stomach emits an ocean of gurgles, Linda has a vision of the ceiling hole, and flees across the road, onto the beach, and into the ocean, where she runs into the breaking waves over and over, until she and the film have exhausted themselves. We finally see her daughter’s face for the first time as Linda promises “I’ll be better, I promise, I’ll be better,” and yet the final note of the film is not moralistic or aspirational. Instead, Bronstein suggests, conventional ideas of agency, accountability and responsibility take people towards the parental interface but collapse as they arrive at it, like an event horizon of relationality that takes Linda further and further away from herself, to a world where “anything could be real,” where dying and dreaming (as the motel superintendent reminds her) result from the same chemical cocktail, the same affect structure as parenthood.