ANALYSIS: If I Had Legs I'd Kick You.

Down the stretch of a hospital-like facility lined with child-sized body cutouts, Linda finds a tracing that resembles her; a smaller, younger, spirited version of a self she can no longer recognize. The cutouts are colored in, crude with words: “fat,” “jiggly,” “want to die,” “worried.” At the center of the little Linda version is a terrible gaping black hole with a tube writhing from the center. One word written inside: Help. This is the image Bronstein used to introduce her characters.

Linda is not the protagonist of this story. She is its most powerful obstruction, a woman at war with her own portrait, unable to see herself whole. The protagonist is smaller. Sicker. Her daughter, only mentioned as “Child,” is attached to a machine, unable to feed herself. She is fighting to survive against Linda’s unresolved guilt, a psychological and maternal wound so deep that it has learned to move through the world like a second character. Child represents her inner child as much as she is her daughter. How Linda cares for her child is a mirror of how little she knows how to care for herself.

That lack of care manifests itself as a black hole, a theme that feels supernatural. It breathes, it watches Linda, it spits out smoke, it breeds flies, it lives in her daughter’s stomach, it looms as a gaping hole dripping water above her bed at home. It serves as a living part of Linda that she hasn’t faced. The ungrieved aftermath of her abortion. A part of her that she believes no one could love. The part of her that became a mother anyway. On Page 107, Linda says “I am one of those people who wasn’t supposed to be a mom.”

This is a subtlety that bubbles up as a song throughout the screenplay. Harry Nilsson’s “Think About Your Troubles” is a song about a teardrop cycling through the ocean, fish, a whale, the whale’s decomposing body, salt water, filter, back to the teacup that catches a tear. The song is the film’s thesis made audible. It argues that the body remembers. It cycles through bodies, from mother to daughter, from the hole a vacuum carved in one body to the one in her daughter’s stomach that won’t close, until someone interrupts the pattern. Linda sang it into her daughter’s ear in the dark while she slept. On page 131, her daughter sings it back.