The nightmarish stresses of motherhood and work are pushed to their absurdist extremes in Mary Bronstein’s stellar piece of cinematic anxiety, starring a bravura Rose Byrne as a woman on the verge of something far beyond a nervous breakdown. Bronstein’s breathless, pressure-cooker visual approach and Byrne’s fearlessly committed performance (which earned her the Silver Bear at this year’s Berlinale) contribute to a full-throttle film that depicts life as a series of never-ending fires—without losing its sense of fanciful humor.

A therapist whose life has become one crisis after another, Linda (Byrne) and her young daughter (who requires a feeding tube due to a mysterious illness) have had to relocate to a motel following a cataclysmic ceiling leak in their house. Meanwhile, her own therapist and colleague (Conan O’Brien) has reached his own boiling point, her toughest patient (Danielle Macdonald) is a needy bundle of nerves that’s spilling over into Linda’s personal life, and her belligerent husband (Christian Slater) is unhelpfully away on a business trip.

Reviews
"Delivering a feverish, raw-nerve performance sure to go down as one of the year’s greats, Byrne has never had a role even remotely this intense to prepare us for the emotional acrobatics her writer-director has in store." – Variety