Film Reviews: If I Had Legs I'd Kick You is viscerally intense and stress-inducing
Rose Byrne stars in If I Had Legs I'd Kick You
★★★★☆
“Perception is reality,” a psychotherapist tells Linda (Rose Byrne) during (15A), which really isn’t very useful to a woman who is silently screaming for help.
In the absence of her husband Charles (Christian Slater), who is working away from home, Linda — a psychotherapist herself — is desperately juggling work, caring for her young daughter (the ailment is unspecified, but involves the unnamed child being fed through a tube) and the needs of her own patients.
When her apartment is flooded, leaving a huge hole in the ceiling, Linda is forced to move to a nearby motel, at which point Linda’s simmering meltdown is finally set alight.
Written and directed by Mary Bronstein, is effectively a psychological horror in which our heroine is haunted by the guilt of failing as a mother. “I just want someone to tell me what to do,” Linda tells her own therapist (Conan O’Brien), a plaintive cry that will likely resonate with every parent in the audience.
As a professional therapist dealing with a young mother (Danielle Macdonald) obsessed with potential threats to her newborn baby, Linda understands the need to help her client shrug off society’s willingness to ‘blame and shame’; as a self-professed failing mother herself. However, Linda finds herself caught in a doom-spiral as she self-medicates with wine and weed.
A viscerally intense and stress-inducing film that’s rich in metaphor (there’s a distinctly Freudian aspect to that hole in the apartment ceiling; the child’s feeding tube is effectively an umbilical cord), revolves around an exceptional performance from the Oscar-nominated Rose Byrne, who spends most of the movie in extreme close-up as we absorb the nerve-shredding terror of a mother who believes that she’s getting it fatally wrong.
★★★☆☆
When climate change causes a mutant space-fungus to escape from its (15A), retired eco-terrorism specialist Robert Quinn (Liam Neeson) saddles up once again and makes his way to the old military installation in Kansas, where Travis (Joe Keery) and Naomi (Georgina Campbell) — the night watch crew at the now repurposed self-storage facility — are already at war with a new species with a fearful capacity to evolve.
Jonny Campbell’s movie, which is written by David Koepp, is a blackly comic sci-fi horror that aims to maximise the madcap chaos faced by characters who aren’t exactly hewn from heroic stock. Robert’s efforts, for example, are limited due to recurring issues with his bad back, while Travis and Naomi aren’t useless, exactly, but are far more interested in their immediate survival than the fate of humanity.
The genre-splicing isn’t as seamless as we might wish, but Cold Storage is an unabashed blast of pure cinematic hokum.
★★★★☆
Set in Brazil in 1977, (15A) stars Wagner Moura as Armando, an academic on the run from the country’s military dictatorship.
Seeking sanctuary in Recife in a commune run by Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), Armando plots to escape from Brazil with his young son, unaware that he has been targeted for assassination by the professional killers Augusto (Roney Villela) and Bobbi (Gabriel Leone).
Written and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho, — which is nominated for a Best Film Oscar — is the kind of spy story championed by Eric Ambler, in which a civilian stumbles into a world of threat and danger; in Armando’s Brazil, during its ‘period of great mischief’, the cops kill civilians with impunity against a backdrop of corruption, racism, poverty, and institutionalised cruelty.
Soaked in sweat and fear, rooted in a prosaic reality and studded with the Kafkaesque paradoxes of life under a totalitarian regime, is a powerful testament to the human spirit, with Wagner Moura in towering form in the pivotal role.
- all theatrical releases
