Rose Byrne won a Golden Globe and is nominated for an Oscar for her performance in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. It’s a film about frayed mother Linda (Byrne) coping with her daughter’s strange, unspecified feeding disorder.

In director Mary Bronstein’s words, the film is “a surreal, horrifying, blackly funny portrait of a mother simultaneously kicking against and coming to terms with her maternal instincts”. Bronstein has drawn from her experiences with her own child’s illness, responding to what she sees as a gap in film and TV of authentic depictions of motherhood – or as she puts it: “Fully dimensional portraits of women who feel they can’t do it [and] are traumatised by expectations and circumstances.”

Representations of psychotherapy are foregrounded in the film. It opens in a counselling session with a paediatric specialist. An intense close-up holds on Byrne’s face as she defends herself from accusations that as a mother, she lacks boundaries and discipline. According to her daughter (Delaney Quinn): “Mommy is like putty [while] Daddy is hard.” When Linda crossly refutes the comment, the doctor tells her that “perception is reality”.

The film goes on to present the reality of Linda’s perception, as she becomes increasingly exhausted and overwhelmed, experiencing wild supernatural visions. The camera interrogates her psychologically, rarely disengaging from Byrne’s face and mostly shooting her fraught reactions in extreme close-up.

This makes for an extraordinarily intense, probing experience that requires an actor........

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