If I Had Legs I'd Kick You: does the daughter die? The last ten minutes might not be happening at all

Let's deal with the question as asked: no, the daughter does not die. Mary Bronstein's film threatens it constantly — the feeding tube, the beeping drip, the undiagnosed illness — but the child survives the film. The genuinely destabilising question is what happens to her mother, and whether the ending you watch is happening at all.

A film shot from inside a migraine

Rose Byrne plays Linda, a Montauk therapist whose life is one long systems failure: a medically fragile daughter hooked to a nutrient drip, a husband (Christian Slater) reduced to a hectoring voice on the phone, a ceiling that collapses in a biblical gush of water, exile to a grotty motel, and a therapist of her own — a magnificently deadpan Conan O'Brien — who also happens to be her supervisor. Time Out called the result

"a thriller of teeth-grinding magnificence,"

and the Berlinale handed Byrne the Silver Bear for it. Bronstein wasn't inventing: her own daughter fell ill at seven, and treatment stranded the pair in a motel room for eight months. As she told Rolling Stone:

"I'd be in this motel room, in bed, staring at the ceiling."

Crucially, Bronstein commits to one formal rule: the daughter is a voice. For nearly the entire film the camera refuses to show the child's face — she's off-frame, behind doors, a demand emanating from somewhere below the lens.

Read more: Barry Lyndon ending explained: Kubrick gives the last word to a title card, not to Barry

So: those last ten minutes

The climax stacks Linda's failures until she snaps — the tube crisis she wasn't present for, the stranger who soothes her child better than she can — and she sprints, fully clothed, into the night ocean. Then the coda: Linda with her daughter, the child's face shown clearly for the first time, a promise that mummy will be better, and a smile.

Read straight, it's a fragile recovery. Read crooked, it's the fantasy of a drowning woman — and the film gives that reading real legs. The whole thing has taken place inside Linda's skull: subjective sound, hallucinatory imagery, a daughter she literally could not see. Byrne herself has described the design in exactly those terms:

"She's so disassociated from the experience that's happening to her"

— adding that Linda can't truly see her daughter until the very end. Whether "the very end" is a breakthrough or a last mercy, Bronstein declines to rule. The face reveal is either the moment Linda surfaces, or the one thing she'd want to see on the way down. The film keeps both doors open and turns the lights off.

Earlier we wrote: Robert Pattinson's To Catch a Predator film shot several different endings