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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.
Added to this, Linda has deep depression, managed through weed, wine and entirely unhelpful therapy sessions with her impatient colleague (Conan O’Brien) who has an office next to hers, in a hilariously incestuous arrangement. In these she behaves like quite as much of a screwup as any of her own patients, and at one stage concludes a conversation with him by quietly saying: “I love you.” Added to all of this, her apartment is flooded through a gaping hole in the ceiling – about which she has Freudian visions and dreams – meaning she and her daughter have to move into a scuzzy motel whose superintendent James (played by A$AP Rocky) is the only person who seems to care about Linda.
It’s a terrific performance from Byrne as someone who as mother and therapist must present at all times as keeping it together, but who in fact is losing it every day. She lives in a world of professionalised empathy from caregivers who are eternally wary of giving too much and getting too close for fear of being overwhelmed by other people’s problems. There is plenty of brutal comedy here, especially the horror of seeing a hamster being run over and then cutting hard to a closeup of takeout food. Bronstein is brilliant at conveying mounting panic and a terrible, all-consuming sadness.
