Director Mary Bronstein’s discomfiting new film, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, is a compelling watch. Centred by a career-defining performance from Rose Byrne that has gained her an Oscar nomination, the film is a dark treatise on motherhood, swirling in blame, shame and an increasing sense of dread.

Byrne’s Linda is an exhausted and perpetually worried mother, wife and therapist harbouring both guilt and resentment. She is looking after her seriously sick child, who is almost never shown on screen. Linda is not a woman unravelling, she is unravelled – the remnant pieces disintegrating in front of our eyes through a series of escalating awful events.

Her life is literally falling apart: her daughter’s health is not improving, her work as a therapist is difficult and unfulfilling, her husband (Christian Slater) is away for work and barely interested. Then the ceiling of her apartment falls in.

Byrne is magnetic, searingly raw and unfiltered as a woman pushed to the edge. She is ferociously committed to her performance and has never been better onscreen. She moves with emotional precision, careful and........

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