With her life crashing down around her, Linda attempts to navigate her child's mysterious illness, her absent husband, a missing person, and an increasingly hostile relationship with her therapist.
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CinemaSerf
6
By CinemaSerf
Rose Byrne turns in a terrific performance here, but I found the thrust of the plot to be just a bit too much like a contrived horror movie. She is “Linda”, a therapist whose husband is off piloting a boat and whose un-named daughter has some form of undefined illness that is putting huge pressure on her mother. Then, just to add to her woes, a water leak in their apartment turns her ceiling into a Swiss cheese and forces them to take refuge in a rather basic motel. With the sounds of the child’s feeding machine never far from her dreams, “Linda” heads firmly into the realms of a sleep-deprived and booze-induced nervous breakdown that her own psychiatrist (Conan O’Brien) is unable to help with. She is steadily losing the plot, and so are we. Just what is going on with the woman, and with her faceless offspring? At times this is quite an intensely written and potent observation of mental stress and Byrne really does manage to convey her character’s increasing hysteria quite compellingly, but there are too many pieces of the puzzle missing for us to make any meaningful assessment or to do really much more than recoil from her predicament. A little sense of the proceedings is made right at the very end, but by then I had become too lost, and actually disinterested, in it’s maelstrom of despair. The film does convey quite a powerful message about the importance of listening, and of the frustrations and dangers of not listening, but too many of the ancillary characters are either absent, undercooked or just simplistically portrayed - personally or via the telephone, as little more than excuses for her character to present us with someone ostensibly abandoned by those who might and should want to care for her. In the end it came down to a lack of plausibility for me as it built to a conclusion that became a little more expected as we got to know more about “Linda”. It is worth a look, but really only for a Byrne at the top of her game.
