Dir: Mary Bronstein, US, 2025, 114 mins

Cast: Rose Byrne, Conan O’Brien, Danielle Macdonald

Review by .Carol Allen

While no physically legless person appears in this film, the title is an accurate metaphor for the frustration and helplessness experienced by the main character. Linda (Rose Byrne) is a mother, a state of being which is one of unconditional love and total fulfillment – so we’re told. Not always and certainly not in this case.

Linda’s demanding daughter (unseen until the very end) is suffering from some sort of eating disorder which involves a feeding tube in her stomach and a beeping feeding machine, which keeps Linda awake at night. Her husband (Christian Slater) is a ship’s captain, so absent most of the time.

She has a full time job as a therapist, though as a physician she is unable to heal herself – the therapist she herself is seeing is one of her colleagues in the practice (Conan O’Brien), who is impatient of her situation and needs and is no help whatsoever. And to make everything worse the ceiling of her house has collapsed due to a massive and unexplained leak (a very surreal event this) and she and her daughter are now living in a grotty motel room.

You know from the very beginning that this story is going to be told from Linda’s point of view, as until well into the film the camera hardly leaves her face in big close up. We are in there with her in her personal nightmare. Byrne well deserves her Oscar nomination. She gives a terrific performance.

Telling its story very much from inside Linda’s head the film is sometimes as exhausting to the viewer as the situation is to her. Her husband nags her from afar via the telephone; her daughter’s physician is displeased at the patient’s lack of progress; the workmen have failed to fix the destroyed ceiling and except for James ((A$AP Rocky), who is her neighbour in the motel, nobody listens to her.

In one particularly powerful scene, the myth of universal maternal fulfillment is totally exploded when Caroline (Danielle Macdonald), one of the patients whom Linda is struggling to help, confesses that she feels nothing for the demanding little creature on her lap who gives nothing in return, and then compounds that by handing her baby to Linda and walking out.

There are times when the constant pressure of the storytelling gets a little tedious and you might well start to feel as exhausted as Linda. The film is a bit of an endurance test for the audience as well. What holds it together though is Byrne’s performance. She really is magnificent.