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The Premieres section is often where ticket buyers look for star power at the Sundance Film Festival, and the section included world premieres of new projects starring Rose Byrne, Dev Patel, and Benedict Cumberbatch, of varying quality about people with varying insanity. Let’s just jump into it.
A24 brought a few films to Sundance this year, including the imminently opening “The Legend of Ochi” and “Opus,” but the early buzz for their slate went to Mary Bronstein’s “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” a film that has been described by multiple people as “Uncut Gems” meets “Nightbitch.” This is accurate in that Bronstein endeavors to present motherhood as not just a traditional movie cliché burden but an almost existential nightmare. To that end, she starts her film at 11 and stays there for roughly two hours, offering few releases from a dread-inducing journey through the existence of a truly troubled woman. Like a few Sundance films I’ve seen this year, it’s a film that I really like in moments, and I think I may respond more strongly if I see it again, but I have to admit to finding its aggressive misery exhausting. Although I do think that’s the point. I’m just not yet convinced there’s depth or purpose in the brutality.
One thing I don’t need to see it again to know now is that Rose Byrne does her career-best dramatic work here as Linda, a mother on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She’s introduced in extreme close-up, a choice that Bronstein maintains for much of the film, especially when Linda’s child is around. We hear the girl but only get glimpses of her in frame like a socked foot or a lock of hair. It’s a fascinating choice to really put us in the mindset of Linda and more so to avoid some of the clichés of the “sick child melodrama.” That’s not the film that Bronstein wanted to make, focusing on the deteriorating mental and emotional state of Linda instead of the physical state of her child that would always draw our focus if she were in frame.
Linda’s kid has an undefined illness but we know it’s one that requires a nightly feeding tube that mom has to monitor on and off all night, a situation that gets even more stressful when a leak causes a hole in the ceiling of her bedroom, forcing the pair to move to a Jersey hotel. Dad (Christian Slater) appears mostly in phone calls, rarely adding anything helpful and insisting that Linda do the work while he’s on a business trip. Everyone insists “Linda do the work.” The taciturn doctor caring for Linda’s child comes down on mom constantly; one of Linda’s patients (Danielle MacDonald) is a ticking time bomb of neuroses that expects Linda to fix her; even Linda’s colleague/therapist (an excellent Conan O’Brien) seems annoyed by her. Only a neighbor at the hotel (A$AP Rocky) seems to offer anything in the way of assistance, and Linda’s world continues to quite literally crumble around her.
Byrne digs deep to find a raw truth about a woman who has had to fend for herself for years. Despite being a working therapist herself, she’s supposed to basically be a stay-at-home mom to a sick child at the same time, fixing everyone’s problems but her own. She really captures those chapters in life when it feels like everything is working against you, and it’s a performance that grows increasingly impressive physically as the non-stop assault of the world around her gets reflected in Byrne’s eyes and exhausted frame. It’s a truly great piece of acting that portrays motherhood as not just a tricky thing to navigate but a war that sometimes erupts in bloody battles.
My issue with “If I Had Legs” is one of pacing and momentum. It starts at such an intense nightmarish peak that it doesn’t have much room to build, becoming almost numbing in its Linda torture. The few diversions from this, including scenes with A$AP Rocky and O’Brien, do their part to alleviate the oppressive nature of the film, but it’s not long before we’re thrust back into what most people would call one of the worst days of their lives.
Again, this is clearly intentional. We’ve all had chapters of our lives when it felt like everything was conspiring to work against us. And I find a quote from Bronstein in the notes for the film fascinating when she says she’s trying to replicate “when you’re in such a deeply stressed, out-of-your-mind state that all problems become equal.” She achieves that equality of awfulness in her film, even if I’m still unpacking if just getting there is the same thing as saying something about it.
There’s a similar diminishing of mental faculties for a protagonist in Dylan Southern’s deeply frustrating “The Thing with Feathers,” a sort of thematic partner to the buzzed Sundance drama “Omaha” in that both are about a father of two dealing with the grief of a lost partner. That’s where the comparisons end because they couldn’t be more different tonally. Southern reaches for a sort of fever dream logic, adapting Max Porter’s novella about a man haunted by grief in a very literal form. It’s a bit reductive but Southern’s film could accurately be called “The Babadook” for parental grief as Benedict Cumberbatch’s unnamed father is haunted by a massive, speaking crow, a figure in black that represents his unresolved grief. Despite building to some impressive imagery, Southern’s film takes forever to get where it’s going, forcing an admittedly committed Cumberbatch to play miserable confusion for ages before the film finally finds the imagery to support his journey.
We meet dad and his two kids on the day they’ve buried the matriarch of their family, who we learn died suddenly. Whether dad listening to The Cure and reading about the Baba Yaga to his kids in the wake of their mother’s death is supposed to be on-the-nose funny is unclear, but it’s not long before dad is being visited by what first seems an ordinary crow but becomes something much more menacing. Of course, the crow/grief distracts dad from the real work: ushering his two boys through unimaginable pain themselves and dealing with his own. He pours himself into his graphic artist work, snaps at the kids, and gets verbally and even physically abused by a giant crow.
With elements that feel inspired by Tim Burton and Edward Gorey, there are undeniably strong visual aspects to “Feathers,” but Southern takes too long to get to the ones that really connect, and he struggles greatly with mood, making a film that always feels at arm’s length instead of getting under your skin. Apparently, the novella is very free-form and not traditional prose, which always makes for a tough adaptation. There are sections of the story that feel like they would be more effective from page to imagination than they are when a filmmaker has to make them literal.
Everyone either has dealt or will deal with crushing grief, the kind that makes us bad fathers, husbands, and friends because of how hard it can be to function in that state. Southern does get to a sequence that is so impressive that it nearly saves the film involving an entryway and demons at the door, but it’s so late into what is an exhausting film that I was just ready to fly away.
Another film about a decaying mental state—it may not be reflective of the whole program but my assignments this year are almost entirely soul-crushing, which says something about me, Sundance, the world, or all three—premiered on a disappointing Friday night at Eccles. Bryn Chainey’s “Rabbit Trap” felt like a surefire hit for this fan of folk horror (go watch “Oddity” if you haven’t yet btw). The horror subgenre about things in the woods or under the earth that have been there long before humans trod the ground has often worked for me, but not this time. Chainey’s work starts with promise, but it’s a film that grows increasingly frustrating as you realize it has nowhere interesting to go and nothing to say. It’s almost aggressively opaque, an experiment that plays with sound and violent imagery to no end. I love films that allow room for interpretation, but any effort to do so with “Rabbit Trap” only leads down a neverending hole.
“With your eyes, you enter the world. With your ears, the world enters you.” It’s an interesting idea to suggest that vision is our active engagement with what the world provides whereas the sounds of this planet are the response, and sometimes we don’t want to hear them. Darcy (Dev Patel) is recording those sounds in a remote section of Wales with his partner/musician Daphne (Rosy McEwan, so great in “Blue Jean” and the best thing here), who often turns them into music. Suddenly, a child appears near their very remote home, a creepy presence played by 12-year-old Jade Croot, who, and I mean no offense at all, looks almost ageless, like something that came from the earth. The kid is very intentionally unnamed and seems to almost move in with Darcy and Daphne, showing them around the region, speaking of ancient fairies and powerful flora. Then things get even weirder.
And more frustrating. Sitting in the Eccles, you could feel people check out of “Rabbit Trap” at different points, and I believe I hung on for longer than most, hoping that Chainey would reach an interesting destination. After an impressive sequence in which Darcy and Daphne get lost in the woods/caves, “Rabbit Trap” truly spirals into absurdity. It’s a film that reminded me a great deal of Ben Wheatley’s work on projects like “In the Earth” and “A Field in England,” but not in the way Chainey probably intended in that I was reminded of the high degree of difficulty of keeping engaging what could best be called psychedelic logic.
Even if “Rabbit Trap” was intent to just become a series of disconnected images and sounds in its final act, it demanded a filmmaker with a stronger eye than Chainey. There’s a chance it was just too ambitious a project for a feature debut filmmaker, one who got trapped in his own ideas.
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