No Escapism: Mary Bronstein’s Claustrophobic Spaces

Rose Byrne in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025), directed by Mary Bronstein. © Logan White / © A24.

There are certain films you only need to see once. Their impression is so thoroughly sealed upon visual impact that it hangs around residually ever after. These one-offs then linger on to become an object of sub-rosa attention and recollection, like a woodstain on your desk or a scar on your hand over which you absentmindedly cast your gaze as you type.

After my first and only viewing of John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence (1974), while hiding away in my university’s screening room and shirking off writing an undergraduate essay on epistemology, I remember thinking: “I will never watch this film again.” What could subsequent viewings achieve? Indeed, I remember not long after declaring A Woman Under the Influence to be my favorite film because I couldn’t imagine myself watching it again.

Few films truly hold us captive. Notwithstanding the overreliance of film journalists on the adjective “captivating” for films that are often scarcely even diverting, until I’d spent those two hours entangled in the disintegrating domestic and psychological world of Mabel (Gena Rowlands) and Nick (Peter Falk), I had not suspected that narrative film could actually enclose and smother us so thoroughly, that it could be “captivating” in the sense of waking up to find oneself bound, gagged, and locked into the speeding car boot of two strangers’ lives. This form of emotional captivity—it could well be termed “no escapism”—was of course integral to Cassavetes’s art. Take for instance the all-too-close crops of his Faces (1968) or the distended public dramas of Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), in which the viewer starts to feel like they’re intruding. The captivity of A Woman subsists as much as anything in the film’s irresolution, in its refusal to provide easy catharsis to the viewer regarding Mabel’s subsequent fate. As Cassavetes affirmed: “The idea behind [A Woman] was a concept of how much you have to pay for love … I knew that love created at once great moments of beauty and on the other hand it makes you a prisoner.”1 His was a vision of cinema as a truly “all-over” space of enclosure.

The visionary structuralist filmmaker Peter Kubelka, alongside the architects Johannes Spalt and Friedrich Kurrent, similarly conceived of their “Invisible Cinema” in the late 1950s as a high-modernist machine for ensuring the most intense and immediate transmission-relay between director and audience. All possible sources of interference in this speculative cinema were to be excised out of the viewing experience. It would be a monochromatic space without any extraneous ornament, with black velvet curtains, black seats, black carpets, a heightened projector to ensure no bobbing heads in front of your Brakhage or Tony Conrad, hooded seats, elevated rows on a high “rake,” and most notoriously of all, wooden blinkers positioned at either side of the spectator’s head so that any given viewer in the Invisible Cinema would remain truly captive, sealed off and oblivious to their neighbor’s doings. This spatial configuration was buttressed by an additional layer of shushes mandating silence, and of course, no ambient mastication of popcorn.

Kubelka & co.’s endeavor, which was eventually realized in 1970 at the original Anthology Film Archives space in New York (though it would only last there for four years), was undeniably a product of their love and deep respect for the integrity and sanctity of the experimental film-going experience. Drifting into the language of information theory, Kubelka declared that the purpose of the Invisible Cinema was to bring “the filmed message from the author to the beholder with a minimum of loss,” and to accordingly “make the screen [the viewer’s] whole world.”2 But this ascetic space of contemplation was also a prison—one whose inmates reported feelings of extreme, drug-like disorientation.

Peter Kubelka, Johannes Spalt, and Friedrich Kurrent’s “Invisible Cinema.” Austrian Film Museum, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Mary Bronstein makes films whose queasy visions of domestic anxiety resonate both with the lossless transmissions of Kubelka’s flickering avant-garde chamber and the emotional captivity of Cassavetes’s anti-escapist dramas. Her two films to date insist both formally and emotionally on making her screen the whole world, while existing in a world of busy other screens. Bronstein makes captivating films for our moment of “divided attention,” which is more akin to an 1870s horseshoe theater or music hall (in which the majority of seats faced one another rather than the stage, and the crowd was accordingly as interested in one another as in whatever was on stage) than to the dark, silent, and self-consciously hyperattentive frontal alignment of Wagner’s Festspielhaus in Bayreuth.3

Bronstein’s latest film, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025), arrives seventeen years after her “mumblecore” debut, the sleeper hit Yeast (2008). After premiering at Sundance, If I Had Legs recently showed at the Berlinale, where its lead actor, Rose Byrne, deservedly picked up a Golden Bear. If I Had Legs follows Linda (Byrne), a Long Island therapist under the influence of a cascading sequence of stressors, which combine to produce a kind of cinematic aneurysm. The film starts with its protagonist’s roof literally falling in during a torrential downpour, which forces her to move out with her daughter to a rundown motel until their place can be renovated. Linda’s unnamed daughter is chronically ill with an undisclosed gastric condition, and a great deal of time must be spent attending to her complex needs and to the medical apparatus upon which she depends. She refuses to eat, so she must be connected by tube to a machine at night; by day her mother must ferry her to a clinic for children suffering from the same condition, where a condescending nurse impugns Linda’s capacities as a mother. At her work as a therapist, Linda must navigate her patients’ sexual fantasies, their banalities and psychodramas, the strong headwinds of transference and countertransference. She is also up against the unimpeachable obstinacy of one of her colleagues, who is also her … therapist (an inspired piece of casting: Conan O’Brien)—to whom she is now paying increasingly fractious daily visits, and toward whom she has the typically complicated feelings of a therapy patient. Linda must also deal with her husband’s absence (he is away captaining a ship on the high seas, and we meet him only via his cartoonishly high-pitched speakerphone transmissions), the disappearance of the contractors assigned to mend the gaping hole in her ceiling, a feral hamster, her reliance on an anxiolytic nocturnal diet of weed, wine, and YouTube breathing exercises, the solicitations of her neighbor at the motel (another left-field casting choice: A$AP ROCKY), her new propensity for hallucinations, and her increasing suspicion that fundamentally she’s “just not one of those people who is meant to be a mother.” She is blinkered on all sides by responsibilities, interruptions, demands.

Several formal strategies tessellate in If I Had Legs to heighten the film’s unique discomfiture and claustrophobia. Most of these relate to Bronstein’s oppressive treatment of space—both on screen and off. The most noteworthy of these spatial strategies is the filmmaker’s decision to consign Linda’s daughter, around whom so much of the film’s action revolves, almost entirely to the off-screen space. We learn of her existence only through her steady, unbroken transmission of observations and demands, and the effects we can see her registering in the world around her. There is an echo here of the Bildverbot recently undertaken by Jonathan Glazer’s Zone of Interest, though the overall effect in Bronstein’s film is both subtler and more poignant (it is also a cunning inversion of the de facto prohibition on depicting adults in full in so many classic children’s cartoons). Aside from this, the tight cropping and limited “coverage” of director of photography Christopher Messina’s compositions in the on-screen space blinker us in too closely to Byrne’s face and those of her interlocutors. This gives free reign to the extraordinary range of Byrne’s microexpressions, her mutability of panic, with the ultimate effect that we never quite know how close or how far anything in this world is from anything else. Very few establishing shots orient us in space, resulting in the same woozy contortion as a de Chirico painting (what lies around that corner, toward which everything else in the composition seems to incline?). In the end this proves to be less about coverage than smotherage.

Manny Farber taxonomized filmic space into “(1) the field of the screen, (2) the psychological space of the actor, (3) the area of experience and geography that the film covers.”4 In If I Had Legs, our overall immersion in (1) and (2) correspondingly locks us out as viewers from the orientating axis given by (3). It is disquieting to watch Linda leave a candid appointment with her therapist and then walk down the hall to perform the opposite role of therapist in her own office. It is even more unsettling and brave that this film, which enjoys toying with the viewer’s complicity in moral judgements as to whether Linda is a fit mother, deprives us of a crucial bit of information: How far is Linda’s motel, where her sick daughter is sleeping alone attached to her machine, from her apartment? During her increasingly frequent nightly excursions to inspect the gigantic hole in her apartment ceiling, with a baby monitor in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other, the film’s spatial contortion of this question of the distance between motel and apartment (the distance between mother and daughter) only contributes to our imbrication in the protagonist’s feeling of tremulous dread. As Mary Bronstein affirmed during the press conference at the Berlinale: “I wanted the audience to be with the movie in an experiential way, instead of a detached one. You’re in the movie, you’re feeling these feelings, and they’re uncomfortable.” She wasn’t wrong—and I will never watch it again.