Writer-director Mary Bronstein keeps the lid clamped tight on this pressure cooker of a movie.
Nearly two decades after her debut, Yeast, Bronstein returns with an unflinching portrait of a mother in freefall, daring the audience to laugh, while never softening the raw discomfort of what unfolds over the taut 113-minutes.
Drawing on her lived experience, the filmmaker delivers an abrasively authentic drama, driven by a career-best performance from Rose Byrne as a woman nearing collapse while caring for her unseen, ailing daughter, played by Delaney Quinn. The choice to not show the young girl's face is more than stylistic, it heightens the claustrophobia and traps us inside the mother's fraying psyche.
Byrne delivers a high-wire performance of extraordinary volatility. Her character swings between biting humour and raw panic grappling with medical crises, an emotionally absent husband (Christian Slater) and an apartment that is, literally crumbling around her. A widening crack in the ceiling becomes a stark, almost brutal metaphor: the architecture of motherhood, her sense of self, fracturing under pressure.
The Oscar-nominated actress, long celebrated for her comic timing, brings fearless emotional range, allowing humour and anguish to coexist in the same breath. The result is a portrait of exhaustion so vivid it verges on suffocating, an impressively unsparing piece of work, though not always an easy one to watch.
Bronstein directs with electric intensity crafting the film’s fraught, disorientating energy, with the cinematography clinging closely to our lead, enforcing a stifling rhythm echoing the movie’s chaos.
Lucian Johnston’s sharply angled edits carve a rhythm of unease, with each cut amplifying the unnerving atmosphere, while Filipe Messeder’s sound design is a character in its own right twisting everyday noises into an immersive texture that blurs the line between external reality and inner psychological mayhem.
The ending opts for a neatness at odds with the turmoil that comes before, but in every other respect the film delivers a kick that is as unrelenting as it is exhilarating.
