Writer-director Mary Bronstein’s 2008 debut feature film, Yeast, typified the mumblecore filmmaking ethos, bringing a painfully raw emotionality and lo-fi sheen to a classic tale of friendships gone sour. Working with a bevy of indie film heavy hitters like Greta Gerwig, Josh and Benny Safdie, Sean Price Williams and Bronstein’s husband, Ronald Bronstein, she creates what Lotta calls “vital, visceral, mind-burning cinema.”

In the seventeen years since that auspicious debut, Bronstein has honed this frequency to perfection with her follow-up feature, the dark psychological comedy If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. “An anxiety attack that starts at a high, then only intensifies as the movie goes on,” writes Jaime.

The film stars a career-best Rose Byrne as Linda, a therapist teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown as she juggles caring for a child with a mysterious illness, her relationship with her absent husband (Christian Slater), the needs of her patients—including a fragile new mom (Danielle Macdonald)—and a hostile parasocial relationship with her own therapist (Conan O’Brien)… all while living in a motel while her home undergoes repairs after a freak disaster leaves it uninhabitable. The result is what Makayla calls a “stunning, visceral film” that feels like “screaming into the void and it’s screaming back at you.”

The psychologically fraught and darkly comic tale, which The King of Burbank finds to be a “devastating depiction of caregiving,” was inspired by the filmmaker’s experience navigating a tricky health scare with her own child while living an isolated existence inside a hospital-subsidized motel for a few months. To recapture the essence of that uneasy time in her life, Bronstein plunges the audience directly into Linda’s increasingly unhinged point of view, removing the film’s negative space and crafting a soundscape that is anything but soothing.

Byrne’s prickly performance pushes her irrepressibly lovable persona nearly to its breaking point as Linda becomes more and more aggravated by her situation and makes increasingly poor decisions. The performer’s go-for-broke approach landed her the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance at the 75th Berlin International Film Festival earlier this year.

After the film’s screening at the New York Film Festival, I spoke with Bronstein about her interest in human psychology, embracing the uncomfortable chaos of life, the inspiration behind that hamster scene and more.

What’s interesting about what you’re saying is that it’s at the heart of the tradition of filmmaking that I’m making this film in, which is a tradition of a film that asks more questions than it gives answers, that doesn’t hold your hand. I don’t want to generalize, but it’s a very male instinct to try to solve a puzzle or decode a thing, and there is nothing to solve or decode.

In this film, like the films I’m talking about that this is in the tradition of, there’s no answer that could be wrong for any of the questions that I’m asking, or, rather, that I’m not answering. Because everybody who comes and sits in the movie seat that they’re sitting in is coming with their own experience, with their own life, with their own what happened to them that day, but also what happened to them for their whole life, their experiences. And they’re sitting there and they’re watching the film, and their experience of the film is going to be different than the person next to them, just by the nature of the fact that we are all individuals.

To hear all these interpretations is such an exciting thing for me as a filmmaker, as as an artist. Some viewers have come up to me after screenings and directly engaged with me on them, and some have wanted to know, “This is what I think. Am I right?” What I always say is, “You’re right because you can’t be wrong. You can’t be wrong because you took the film seriously and you took it in and you’re thinking about it. You got an answer for yourself—that’s having a dialogue with the film, which is, as a filmmaker, what I want.” My nightmare would be someone who is watching it so passively that they aren’t wondering these things.

I read a great piece that someone wrote about the way you use space and time, where they quote Manny Faber’s theory about space in film, in which he breaks it down into three things: (1) the field of the screen, (2) the psychological space of the actor, (3) the area of experience and geography that the film covers. Your movie takes away the geography, because we’re so in her eyeballs, which Rose Byrne said you were hoping to do with your camera. Were you thinking that theoretically when you were making it?
Yes, on purpose. In any of my work, even if you look at my older work, I don’t believe in establishing shots. I don’t believe in exposition. I don’t believe that audiences need that. Sometimes you need to understand, for example, in The Shining, what that entire place looks like, because it is a character in the film, right? So there’s a big establishing shot of the hotel. But in stories like this, exposition can only weaken the emotional experience that the viewer is having. What it’s basically saying to the viewer is, “I don’t trust that you’re going to get this, so I’m going to put in a line in there that’s going to explain it.”

By taking out all the negative space—like in a painting or a photograph, you would call it negative space if there’s no content in one part of the canvas—you’re dropped into a situation that is already happening. It’s like life. It’s like walking into a room where someone’s already having a conversation. They’re having the conversation, whether you’re there or not.

The great thing about movies—and plays can do this as well in a different way—is that the people don’t know that you’re watching them, but you are. For example, Linda is going through the whole film feeling unheard and unlistened to and quite unseen, and what she doesn’t realize is that I’m forcing the viewer to listen to her and look at her and see her in a way that nobody else in the movie is. That was also part of my conceptual idea.

I definitely saw myself reflected many times in Yeast. And I was like, “Oh, no.”
The thing about being uncomfortable, it’s like, I don’t get what’s scary about that. Sometimes for people, it’s very uncomfortable to be put in somebody else’s point of view that they have no context or experience with. That can be very uncomfortable. That doesn’t mean it’s bad. I’m also of the opinion that if you make something for everybody, you make something for nobody. It also doesn’t bother me if it’s not for somebody. That doesn’t scare me either. It’s very hard to scare me, is what I’m saying.

I saw Jeanne Dielman in a theater once next to an older gentleman who literally had a tantrum in the middle of the film. I think the film broke him. It was fascinating. He couldn’t take it.
Was it at the dinner part?

All of it. He just could not take being in this woman’s shoes for three hours.
What I’m saying is that reaction says something about him.

I agree with that. I’m really fascinated with Danielle Macdonald’s character Caroline, and the postpartum psychosis she’s going through. We’re starting to see more films about this subject done in really empathetic ways, like Elizabeth Sankey’s documentary last year, Witches, which looks at women’s mental health and the historical accusations of witchcraft and where they intersected. It was the first thing I thought of when we got to the reveal of what’s going on with her character. She really needs help.
She needs help.

I don’t think our country is really set up for that. It’s starting to. There are more mother and baby units, where moms can get psychological help and not be separated from their babies.
The UK has that, too.

I was wondering how you developed that aspect of the film?
I’m a collector of stories that come up, either from the news or that I seek out for myself. As somebody who’s fascinated by psychology and human behavior, I’ve always been very interested in the fact that our society barely talks publicly about postpartum depression or, certainly, psychosis. But if a woman has a psychotic break and does something to her child, we definitely hear about that, and that mother is a monster. I have one of them in my film, Andrea Yates.

I remember that case.
I never, ever forgot about her and always would go back to see if there was new information or to even reread the same thing over again. I remember, in preparing the movie, I looked up what is going on with her now. You can’t really find a lot of information, but something that really struck me is that she was sentenced to a hospital, rightfully so, and every year a probation hearing comes up, and she denies it. Every year, she doesn’t want to go. She doesn’t want to be let out. Something about that is so evocative to me.

The most horrifying thing you can think of is committing such a crime because you’re ill, and then getting the right help and medication and then not being ill anymore and realizing what you’ve done. It’s self-imprisonment. When I read that, I understood it, because even if she were free, she wouldn’t be free. The world hates her, so of course she would stay in the hospital. There’s something about that that’s so tragic, but that is also exactly how we treat women in these situations.

I’m getting goosebumps just talking about it. I remember the father being on the news days after this happened, just broken, and saying, “I didn’t take it seriously. When she would say these things, I would just say, ‘No, there’s nothing wrong with him. It’s okay.’ I just didn’t take it seriously.” He kept saying that. But what if it was something she kept private?

In the movie, Caroline is telling Linda what is happening to her, but she doesn’t tell her all the way. It’s supposed to be Linda’s job to intuit it and help her. Of course, Linda should be on family leave. She should not even be practicing at this point. And we see what happens. For me, one of the most poignant moments in the film is when Caroline appears at the motel, and she’s like, “Oh, my God, you’re here. Now everything’s okay. You’re here.” But then she runs away and Linda chases her and they have that moment on the beach where they look at each other, and Caroline realizes, “Oh, this lady is not going to help me.” She goes, and Linda lets her go.

That was always a moment where I thought I was going to lose some viewers, because that’s a choice that she makes and she doesn’t call the police. But it’s okay for me because I know what my intentions were. I haven’t had viewers actually talk to me about that moment, but to me, that’s a pivotal moment, and it rockets us to the end of the film.

That’s the moment when Linda finally accepts that she is not in control of literally anything.
Of anything or anyone. Yeah. It’s all chaos.

That’s another thing that scares people to realize that as human beings, we aren’t really in control of much.
How terrifying to realize that maybe your mom, or anyone’s mom, wasn’t in control all the time, and didn’t have all the answers all the time. Because, as a child—if you have a functional, average childhood—all those things are happening to every mother, but the job of the mother is to keep those things hidden from the child. A lot of mothers are able to do that. Some are not. Then there are all the degrees in between.

Certainly, Linda is a character who is a human being. I want people to take her as that first. She’s a human being who has a child, who has a husband, who has patients, who is a patient, but at the end of the day, she’s a human being. And human beings are flawed. They’re difficult. They can do things that we don’t like. They can do things that are wrong. How do we contend with that and with ourselves?

One of my favorite philosophers is Epictetus, and he talks about how things come at you and the only thing you can control is how you react. Which is not something I’m good at, quite frankly.
That’s the only control we have. It’s very true. How Linda’s reacting is, all she’s doing is reacting. She’s reactive, where she’s literally trying to run away from herself for this whole movie. You can’t run away from yourself, because wherever you go, there you are. You can’t run away from trauma, because it’s inside of you and it’s going to get you.

That’s where the existential terror of this movie sits: it’s going to get you no matter how much alcohol you drink, no matter how much weed you smoke, no matter how much you physically run, no matter how much you’re trying to deny it’s inside of you. And it’s going to come out in some way—in her behavior—and then at a certain point, as we know, it slaps her right in the face.

Then, during that time, my daughter begged me for a hamster, and I was like, “No, we can’t have a hamster. No, no, no, no, no. I don’t want a rodent in a cage. I don’t want anything to do with it. They smell.” I forget what it was that she asked, but she said, “Well, if I do this, could I get a hamster?” I said yes, thinking that she would never do it. Then she did. Then I had to get the hamster. It speaks to that in the film. Every parent has gone through that, where you do a bribe and the minute it comes out of your mouth, you’re like, “Why did I say that?”

In real life, we got this hamster. His name was Max, and Max was the worst. Slept all day, and then at nighttime, when my husband and I would sit on the couch to relax, he would come alive and want to party. He started doing monkey bars on the top of his cage. He would escape. It was like, okay, I’ve got rodents in this house that I’m trying to get rid of and now we have a rodent in this house that I’m taking care of. I couldn’t handle it, so I brought it back to the pet store, and was like, “Here, Max, is your problem now.” So, the hamster comes from that bribery, but then the horror show that it turns into in the film is expressive of my feelings about the hamster.