Space: the final frontier…unless we’re talking movies, in which case the subject matter has had a train ran on it by Hollywood for decades now. But that just reflects the intense fascination the human race has on the great unknown, and we’ve managed to to use it as a lightning rod for a variety of emotions. Fear, loneliness and adventure can all be pulled from the wonders of the universe, but some of my favorite instances use the limitless space to reflect back on the individual and highlight the drive that makes human beings so remarkable. And annoying, but you know, saving the world warrants you to a little silliness.

Project Hail Mary finally gives filmmaking duo Chris Miller and Phil Lord the big budget blockbuster spectacle they were destined to have…like two movies ago. But the duo make the most of the time, driving a charming if not somewhat sickly sweet Ryan Gosling through a visually stunning adventure about human perseverance and having a funny little pet rock. Yeah, it’s cheesy and borderline sugar coated at times, but it still feels like it’s been a while since we’ve gotten a big sci-fi movie that feels so earnest without becoming too overly artificial. It’s been a slow year so far but I do think this is one of those films worth braving the pigsty that is the current movie going experience to see on the biggest screen you can.

The world is dying and humanity is gonna die with it. But enough about current times, a middle school science teacher Ryland Grace is tasked by the government to help fix an extinction-level phenomenon that requires a perilous journey into deep space. Along the way he forms an unlikely friendship with a creature on a similar mission as they race to save their planets and maybe discover a little bit about themselves along the way.

We may never get a The Nice Guys sequel, but I’ll be supporting Ryan Gosling every step of the way regardless. Can’t say the dude doesn’t have range, and in this film, Gosling is tasked with roping in the comedic and dramatic as the character of Ryland Grace carries the somber alienation of being alone in space, but manages to have a silly little time as well. Gosling’s charm is undeniable and he definitely keeps this from growing drab or boring, but the characterization of Grace can admittedly be a bit overbearing at times. This film is all about maintaining hope in the face of insurmountable odds, but does there have to be a joke for every single situation. Lord and Miller are known for their mile a minute joke output, so I wasn’t really mad about that going in, but it does feel like some of Grace’s more dramatic moments are undercut by the need to insert a joke. I get it, comedy is a coping mechanism and all that, but it still feels like the film is struggling to let these moments resonate at times. Gosling is still a delight so it’s not a huge issue, just offputting enough to be likable yet you still totally understand why he’s a got no one in his life.

Turning in the best performance though is Sandra Huller, who plays Eva Stratt, the head of the Hail Mary project and the one who recruits Grace. She’s cold and standoffish, but there’s complexity to her that makes total sense. She, perhaps more than anyone, understands the stakes of what’s to come and approaches the situation with surprisingly more humanity than you’d expect. She isn’t calloused into not caring; she probably cares more than anyone. That’s why when she gets a moment to do some karaoke to Harry Styles Sign of the Times, a surprisingly very apropos song choice, it genuinely shook me more than perhaps any other moment in the movie. She serves as a great foil for the self-conscious and joking Grace, although the film almost hints towards something romantic between them? They don’t pull the trigger on that, which I’m pretty thankful for.

And that’s because Grace already has a soulmate and that’s Rocky, a stone spider type alien he meets on his travels. Rocky’s appearance in the book was a pretty big surprise that wasn’t telegraphed from the get go, but you couldn’t really expect a Hollywood movie to not tell you about its cute little critter. I won’t spoil too much about Rocky’s role in the film, but his relationship with Grace can be quite endearing as they learn more about one another. His Microsoft Sam-esque voice is cute and his butchering of the human language leads to some decent laughs, but it can be a bit much at times. You could tell Rocky was gonna be the merch magnet here, so they really revved him up to be a quirky animal sidekick. It’s fine for what it is, but how can you not at least feel some love for a creature brought to life so effectively.

This thing is really a visual and production marvel, from the puppeteering of Rocky to the rotating sets employed for the spaceship. The big tout that’s been attached to this film is that they used no green screens for this. Of course there are obvious visual effects that can only be generated by a computer, but it’s still astonishing to see some of the visuals they pull off with practicality. Having no green screens means you really have to put some thought into how you’re going to block or light a scene around the environment, and I think that attention to detail really pays off. There’s a groundedness to it that heightens the claustrophobia and the anxiety of being on a ship by yourself, even when the story sometimes to forget about that. 

Now, I haven’t read the book, but my wife has, and a lot of my friends have, so that kinda means I read the book too? Not really, as I can’t really speak too confidently on what the movie gets right and wrong from the book. From what I understand, most of the plot is fairly intact with some specifics either minimized or left out completely. But I want to focus on what it succeeds on as a movie, as well as what it trips up on, removing the book from the equation. Like I said, it’s dazzling to watch while also being humorous and heartfelt, but I can already tell people are gonna have some issues with the comedy. Yeah, it’s a bit cutesy, no doubt in an effort to make this more accessible to younger audiences, but like I kinda mentioned before, it does lead to the movie feeling a bit declawed at times. There’s some real emotional gut punches here that occasionally get hindered by the film being unwilling to drop the humor at times. There’s also some pacing issues here and there that made me dip in and out at times while the film also seemingly struggled to end. There’s like three climactic blowoffs that feel like everything is wrapped up, but then it just keeps going. But overall, these aren’t really huge issues for me, because the team still managed to create a bit of hope-core that does showcase the bravery that lies in all of us that can be brought out due to unfortunate circumstances.

Project Hail Mary is a genuine feel good time at the movies, one that isn’t steeped in irony or pessimism and actually knows how to trigger something deeper in the heart. It also doesn’t hurt that it’s wrapped in visual mastery that only blows you away the more you look at it. I really did enjoy this, but there’s something to it that kept me from outright loving it. Maybe it’s the overly cutesy tone or its narrative dips, but I’m not exactly feeling the urge to rush and see this again. But I definitely think this is 100% worth seeing on the biggest screen you can. It’s been a minute since we’ve gotten something hopeful at this scale, and I think we could all use a little hopium nowadays.

RATING

PETROVA LINE

One of the most stunning visuals in the film involves what’s called astrophages. Basically these microorganisms feed solar energy and form an infrared line from Sun to Venus as they hop across the galaxy. When our hero Grace stands among them, it makes for a really dazzling scene, and I wanted to capture that in a cocktail. So, keeping with the cosmic setting, this is going to be a bit of a cosmopolitan riff, but we’ll be adding some watermelon and gin flavors to the drink, because it is warming up out there and we need a nice drink for summer. The combination of fruit and botanicals make this a sweet, easy to drink cocktail that utilizes a flavor that doesn’t get a ton of play in most cocktails. Additionally, we’ve got a few special ingredients to make it even more cosmic. So I hope you like it, because it’s the only drink we’ve got onboard for the next two decades.

INGREDIENTS

• 1.5oz gin
• 1/2oz lime juice
• 1/2oz cranberry juice
• 1/2oz watermelon liqueur
• 1 dash orange bitters
• Pinch of luster dust (pink preferably but I used purple)
• Garnish: cherry + lime wheel rind

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Add ingredients to a cocktail shaker and shake with ice.
2. Strain into cocktail glass filled with ice.
3. For the garnish, pierce the rind of a lime wheel with a toothpick with a cherry in the center.

PakarPBN

A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.

In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.

The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.

Jasa Backlink

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Until quite recently, depictions of motherhood in cinema were limited to a handful of archetypes: The long-suffering martyr, the angelic caretaker, the fierce protector, perhaps even an absent working woman. That last option was usually presented as negative, if not downright villainous. And darker, more nuanced emotions—ambivalence, doubt, even regret about having children—were not depicted at all. 

Mary Bronstein’s film “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” dives fearlessly into a tangled morass of emotions, dramatized in the unsettling, surreal style of a horror movie and punctuated with moments of tragicomic mirth. Bronstein immerses viewers in the perspective of Linda (Rose Byrne), a woman who may as well be a single mother—her husband, perpetually away on business, is heard but not seen—whose relationship with her daughter is fraying under the strain of the daughter’s (also unnamed, but serious) illness and the immense responsibility of her care. And then there’s the massive hole in the ceiling of their apartment that doubles as a portal into the unknown…

Byrne gives a stunning performance in the film, which is based on Bronstein’s own experiences; those who find it relatable will feel seen and understood, while those who don’t would do well to absorb its lessons and deeply empathetic point of view. We met Bronstein in an empty karaoke room above the chaotic Highball bar at this year’s Fantastic Fest, an eye-of-the-storm location that suited the nature of Bronstein’s film. 

One thing that struck me about this film is that everyone around Linda tells her that she’s doing everything wrong, but no one offers her any actual help. Can you say more about that?

This is a woman in crisis in every way, shape, and form, yet purportedly surrounded by helpers. Mr. Rogers had something he would say. “Look for the helpers.” That’s supposed to offer you comfort, that there are people there whose job is to help.

In this movie, there’s an abundance of helpers. There’s doctors, there’s therapists, there’s husbands, there’s friends, and she is asking all of them for help. Sometimes literally, and sometimes in ways that people should intuit. Sometimes she’s screaming in someone’s face, “Please help me,” and they’re still not. 

There’s a whole thing embedded in that for me, which is this idea of women not being listened to—especially a woman who is in crisis, whether it be physically or mentally in the medical or psychiatric system. “You have to calm down. It’s not that bad. You have to get a good night’s sleep.”

Everyone’s always giving her breathing exercises.

“Take some deep breaths.” This is not helpful. Sometimes what’s helpful (which Linda also doesn’t receive) is you need to have somebody who is just empathetically listening to you without offering a solution.”Yeah, that does suck. Yeah, that fucking sucks. That is unfair. What’s happening to you is unfair.” And she doesn’t get that either. It’s extreme in the film, but when it happens in real life, it feels even more so. And that’s what I was trying to capture.

It all ties in with these societal ideals of motherhood. When you’re a mother, you have to handle everything yourself. There’s a taboo against saying, “I can’t do this.”

There are a lot of taboos when you’re a mother, and a lot of things you’re not allowed to say. And even in the privacy of [talking] one woman to another, who are both mothers, you would never say some of those things. You said, “I can’t do it,” but there’s the other side of that: “I don’t want to do it.” Or “I can’t deal with being around my child right now,” or “I want to get away from my child.” Those are things that mothers are not supposed even to think, let alone say, let alone do. And if you do it, you’re a monster or you’re a crazy person. 

[My film] is getting at that. Who does it scare [when you say these things], and why? As with any other life experience, women and mothers should be able to be honest with each other and themselves. It’s not a betrayal of your love for your child. It’s not. But it’s seen that way. Sometimes a friend will annoy you, or sometimes you don’t like something that they did, and you need a break from them. Your relationship to a child is no different than that, but it’s supposed to be [different]. 

Linda is in a place where she can derive no joy from her child. It doesn’t matter if she put herself in that place by victimizing herself or seeing herself as a victim of her child, or whether that’s actually true. She can’t, because she can’t take her kid to the playground. She can’t take her kid on a vacation. They can’t go to Disney World. She can’t even play with her kid. 

Maybe she could, but she’s not in a place where she can derive joy from the relationship. So it does become a burden. And you’re supposed to be able to talk about [difficult things] in private with your therapist, but even that’s considered inappropriate in the film. It’s something that I think is a problem. When you can’t express things, they don’t go away.

Why do you think it’s so taboo? Personally, I think it has something to do with this misogynist idea of biological determinism. “This is your natural role. This is what you’re made for.”

Exactly. There’s this whole bill of sale that women are sold falsely, which is that just because you have a baby, you know how to be a mother, and you know what to do. It’s supposed to be your instinct, and you know what to do, and you can just do it from dawn to dusk for the rest of time. Mothers are human beings. My mother was a human being. Your mother is a human being. They had feelings that we didn’t know about, but that was okay. That’s okay. It’s okay. It only becomes not okay if you’re abusing your child, but having thoughts and feelings and expressing them in private is still so scary. 

And I think it’s exactly what you said; this is a woman who doesn’t know what to do, and quite literally screams in somebody’s face, “tell me what to do!” And his answer is, “You already know what to do.” No, I don’t!

Does that tie into the cosmic aspects of the film? It’s almost mystical, this rhetoric about mothers “falling in love” and then immediately, instinctually knowing what to do for the rest of their lives. 

The portal will have a different meaning for every viewer, and that’s very exciting for me. But certainly, for Linda, it’s a scary place. A lot is going on there. There are a lot of voices in there. It’s the part of herself that she can’t run away from. 

When you have trauma, you can try to put it [away] somewhere, but it’s going to get you. It’s going to keep getting bigger. It’s going to keep growing, and you can’t get away from it because it’s inside of you, and you can’t get away from yourself. That’s the existential terror that’s at the heart of the movie, and what Linda has to contend with in order to get to the place [she’s in] at the end of the movie. To get to that place, she needs to have her trauma smack her in the fucking face. “I exist. Deal with me. Deal with it.”

It reminds me of that famous monologue from “Network.” “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

The similarity is that it’s yelling into the ether. “Does anybody hear me? Does anything I say mean anything to anybody?”

“Hi, I’m a person!”

“I am a person. Can you see me?” It’s all of that, and the magic of just being heard. The human experience [of being listened to] is so important, and it’s completely absent for this character.

Let’s go back to the hole for a second. The sound design in those sequences is so oppressive; can you tell me about creating that, and what you were going for there? 

The voices we hear in those scenes are all kinds of things. It’s the recordings that I did with Rose [Byrne] and my wonderful child actor, Delaney Quinn. It’s the sound of them playing. It’s clips of my own child playing when she was little. It’s clips of other children that I’ve worked with; I went through my phone, all the way back. 

It’s also voices from Linda’s trauma. It’s “mom, mom, mom, mom! You’re not doing it! Mom! Mom!!” Plus the voice of her therapist, all of these things swirled together. Sometimes you can hear it clearly, and sometimes you can’t. Sometimes it just creates a soundscape.

The movie has no score in a traditional sense. The score is the sound design. It’s a soundscape. It’s always hyper-realistic, but the clock in her office is a little louder than a clock should be. The birds outside are a little louder. It builds and builds and builds until everything in her mind is surrounding us. When we did the sound design, we used the position of the speakers in the theater as a tool: If something is behind Linda, it’s in the speaker [in the back of the theater]. And if I want you to be enveloped, it’s all around.

Most of a movie’s life exists outside of a movie theater. Its first life is in the theater, and then it goes into different forms. But if you can see it in a theater, you should, because that’s the only time when you’ll get the whole experience. It’s an experiential film.

You’re talking about real experiences, and the events in the film are realistic. But over the course of the film, it reaches this heightened, surrealistic state. How did you achieve that? 

The first draft of the script was pure vomiting on paper. Pure expression. Then the refining of it was quite mathematical. The humor I’m using is completely calculated.

I see the movie as a machine. It’s chugging along. And I need the machine to sustain itself for the amount of time I need it to, and to reach the point I need to get to. To do that, you have to release a steam valve. You have to give the audience that little release, and then the audience will go further, go further, go further, go further. Then you’re all the way with me. 

Say I made the same movie completely devoid of humor, which could exist—I don’t think an audience would go all the way with me. Because the machine would explode.

Sure. There’d be too much pressure. 

It would not sustain itself. And I am a person who, as a human being, will find the joke in any tragedy. That’s my coping mechanism. I grew up that way. That’s how my house was. If you’re going to laugh, you’re going to cry. That is something I wanted to have embedded in the film. And also that it’s okay! Sometimes the right reaction, when something is so bad that it’s absurd, is to laugh. It’s a tricky line, and I hope that I achieved it. But it was the necessary line to tell this story.

For me, the most upsetting part of the film was when Linda is on the phone with the husband of one of her clients, asking him to come pick up his baby —

 — Played by my husband, by the way —

And he says, “This is not my emergency.” I was so enraged by that.

Because guess why? It’s not his job to take care of the baby,

To take care of his own baby,

What he says is, “That’s her fucking job. That’s why I’m here working.” It’s not his emergency because he’s not the mother.

In terms of the men and the children in the film, was there a line for you where you thought, “Oh, I’m making them too annoying, too frustrating, too enraging?” Did you ever feel like you needed to pull it back?

No. If somebody feels that way, that’s none of my business. This is the story I wanted to tell, and the way I wanted to tell it. When a movie comes out or any piece of art is released into the world, that’s what you’re supposed to do. 

Art is a form of communication, whether it’s a painting, a song, a movie, whatever. That’s how human beings have always used art. So I am communicating something, and then I’m putting it out into the world. I also feel, in a postmodern way, that once I put it out into the world, it’s none of my business. It’s not mine anymore. It’s yours. And I trust you. I trust the viewer who comes to see my movie. I trust them implicitly. That’s why I don’t hold their hand. That’s why I ask more questions than give answers. And if somebody feels like it’s too much, that’s okay. It doesn’t scare me, because it’s okay to be uncomfortable. 

It can’t be something that I worry about, or else it would impede what I’m doing creatively. If you’re trying to anticipate what people will think while you’re creating, you’re going to get all muddled up. And I was trying in a very pure way not to do that.

How does that tie into what you said about this being an experiential film? 

There are some things that you consume, and there are some things that you experience. This film is something you experience. You don’t passively consume it. As a viewer, those are the kind of movies that I love best. And I’ve had amazing responses to [the film], so I think people are up for it.

gentongfilm

Until quite recently, depictions of motherhood in cinema were limited to a handful of archetypes: The long-suffering martyr, the angelic caretaker, the fierce protector, perhaps even an absent working woman. That last option was usually presented as negative, if not downright villainous. And darker, more nuanced emotions—ambivalence, doubt, even regret about having children—were not depicted at all. 

Mary Bronstein’s film “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” dives fearlessly into a tangled morass of emotions, dramatized in the unsettling, surreal style of a horror movie and punctuated with moments of tragicomic mirth. Bronstein immerses viewers in the perspective of Linda (Rose Byrne), a woman who may as well be a single mother—her husband, perpetually away on business, is heard but not seen—whose relationship with her daughter is fraying under the strain of the daughter’s (also unnamed, but serious) illness and the immense responsibility of her care. And then there’s the massive hole in the ceiling of their apartment that doubles as a portal into the unknown…

Byrne gives a stunning performance in the film, which is based on Bronstein’s own experiences; those who find it relatable will feel seen and understood, while those who don’t would do well to absorb its lessons and deeply empathetic point of view. We met Bronstein in an empty karaoke room above the chaotic Highball bar at this year’s Fantastic Fest, an eye-of-the-storm location that suited the nature of Bronstein’s film. 

One thing that struck me about this film is that everyone around Linda tells her that she’s doing everything wrong, but no one offers her any actual help. Can you say more about that?

This is a woman in crisis in every way, shape, and form, yet purportedly surrounded by helpers. Mr. Rogers had something he would say. “Look for the helpers.” That’s supposed to offer you comfort, that there are people there whose job is to help.

In this movie, there’s an abundance of helpers. There’s doctors, there’s therapists, there’s husbands, there’s friends, and she is asking all of them for help. Sometimes literally, and sometimes in ways that people should intuit. Sometimes she’s screaming in someone’s face, “Please help me,” and they’re still not. 

There’s a whole thing embedded in that for me, which is this idea of women not being listened to—especially a woman who is in crisis, whether it be physically or mentally in the medical or psychiatric system. “You have to calm down. It’s not that bad. You have to get a good night’s sleep.”

Everyone’s always giving her breathing exercises.

“Take some deep breaths.” This is not helpful. Sometimes what’s helpful (which Linda also doesn’t receive) is you need to have somebody who is just empathetically listening to you without offering a solution.”Yeah, that does suck. Yeah, that fucking sucks. That is unfair. What’s happening to you is unfair.” And she doesn’t get that either. It’s extreme in the film, but when it happens in real life, it feels even more so. And that’s what I was trying to capture.

It all ties in with these societal ideals of motherhood. When you’re a mother, you have to handle everything yourself. There’s a taboo against saying, “I can’t do this.”

There are a lot of taboos when you’re a mother, and a lot of things you’re not allowed to say. And even in the privacy of [talking] one woman to another, who are both mothers, you would never say some of those things. You said, “I can’t do it,” but there’s the other side of that: “I don’t want to do it.” Or “I can’t deal with being around my child right now,” or “I want to get away from my child.” Those are things that mothers are not supposed even to think, let alone say, let alone do. And if you do it, you’re a monster or you’re a crazy person. 

[My film] is getting at that. Who does it scare [when you say these things], and why? As with any other life experience, women and mothers should be able to be honest with each other and themselves. It’s not a betrayal of your love for your child. It’s not. But it’s seen that way. Sometimes a friend will annoy you, or sometimes you don’t like something that they did, and you need a break from them. Your relationship to a child is no different than that, but it’s supposed to be [different]. 

Linda is in a place where she can derive no joy from her child. It doesn’t matter if she put herself in that place by victimizing herself or seeing herself as a victim of her child, or whether that’s actually true. She can’t, because she can’t take her kid to the playground. She can’t take her kid on a vacation. They can’t go to Disney World. She can’t even play with her kid. 

Maybe she could, but she’s not in a place where she can derive joy from the relationship. So it does become a burden. And you’re supposed to be able to talk about [difficult things] in private with your therapist, but even that’s considered inappropriate in the film. It’s something that I think is a problem. When you can’t express things, they don’t go away.

Why do you think it’s so taboo? Personally, I think it has something to do with this misogynist idea of biological determinism. “This is your natural role. This is what you’re made for.”

Exactly. There’s this whole bill of sale that women are sold falsely, which is that just because you have a baby, you know how to be a mother, and you know what to do. It’s supposed to be your instinct, and you know what to do, and you can just do it from dawn to dusk for the rest of time. Mothers are human beings. My mother was a human being. Your mother is a human being. They had feelings that we didn’t know about, but that was okay. That’s okay. It’s okay. It only becomes not okay if you’re abusing your child, but having thoughts and feelings and expressing them in private is still so scary. 

And I think it’s exactly what you said; this is a woman who doesn’t know what to do, and quite literally screams in somebody’s face, “tell me what to do!” And his answer is, “You already know what to do.” No, I don’t!

Does that tie into the cosmic aspects of the film? It’s almost mystical, this rhetoric about mothers “falling in love” and then immediately, instinctually knowing what to do for the rest of their lives. 

The portal will have a different meaning for every viewer, and that’s very exciting for me. But certainly, for Linda, it’s a scary place. A lot is going on there. There are a lot of voices in there. It’s the part of herself that she can’t run away from. 

When you have trauma, you can try to put it [away] somewhere, but it’s going to get you. It’s going to keep getting bigger. It’s going to keep growing, and you can’t get away from it because it’s inside of you, and you can’t get away from yourself. That’s the existential terror that’s at the heart of the movie, and what Linda has to contend with in order to get to the place [she’s in] at the end of the movie. To get to that place, she needs to have her trauma smack her in the fucking face. “I exist. Deal with me. Deal with it.”

It reminds me of that famous monologue from “Network.” “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

The similarity is that it’s yelling into the ether. “Does anybody hear me? Does anything I say mean anything to anybody?”

“Hi, I’m a person!”

“I am a person. Can you see me?” It’s all of that, and the magic of just being heard. The human experience [of being listened to] is so important, and it’s completely absent for this character.

Let’s go back to the hole for a second. The sound design in those sequences is so oppressive; can you tell me about creating that, and what you were going for there? 

The voices we hear in those scenes are all kinds of things. It’s the recordings that I did with Rose [Byrne] and my wonderful child actor, Delaney Quinn. It’s the sound of them playing. It’s clips of my own child playing when she was little. It’s clips of other children that I’ve worked with; I went through my phone, all the way back. 

It’s also voices from Linda’s trauma. It’s “mom, mom, mom, mom! You’re not doing it! Mom! Mom!!” Plus the voice of her therapist, all of these things swirled together. Sometimes you can hear it clearly, and sometimes you can’t. Sometimes it just creates a soundscape.

The movie has no score in a traditional sense. The score is the sound design. It’s a soundscape. It’s always hyper-realistic, but the clock in her office is a little louder than a clock should be. The birds outside are a little louder. It builds and builds and builds until everything in her mind is surrounding us. When we did the sound design, we used the position of the speakers in the theater as a tool: If something is behind Linda, it’s in the speaker [in the back of the theater]. And if I want you to be enveloped, it’s all around.

Most of a movie’s life exists outside of a movie theater. Its first life is in the theater, and then it goes into different forms. But if you can see it in a theater, you should, because that’s the only time when you’ll get the whole experience. It’s an experiential film.

You’re talking about real experiences, and the events in the film are realistic. But over the course of the film, it reaches this heightened, surrealistic state. How did you achieve that? 

The first draft of the script was pure vomiting on paper. Pure expression. Then the refining of it was quite mathematical. The humor I’m using is completely calculated.

I see the movie as a machine. It’s chugging along. And I need the machine to sustain itself for the amount of time I need it to, and to reach the point I need to get to. To do that, you have to release a steam valve. You have to give the audience that little release, and then the audience will go further, go further, go further, go further. Then you’re all the way with me. 

Say I made the same movie completely devoid of humor, which could exist—I don’t think an audience would go all the way with me. Because the machine would explode.

Sure. There’d be too much pressure. 

It would not sustain itself. And I am a person who, as a human being, will find the joke in any tragedy. That’s my coping mechanism. I grew up that way. That’s how my house was. If you’re going to laugh, you’re going to cry. That is something I wanted to have embedded in the film. And also that it’s okay! Sometimes the right reaction, when something is so bad that it’s absurd, is to laugh. It’s a tricky line, and I hope that I achieved it. But it was the necessary line to tell this story.

For me, the most upsetting part of the film was when Linda is on the phone with the husband of one of her clients, asking him to come pick up his baby —

 — Played by my husband, by the way —

And he says, “This is not my emergency.” I was so enraged by that.

Because guess why? It’s not his job to take care of the baby,

To take care of his own baby,

What he says is, “That’s her fucking job. That’s why I’m here working.” It’s not his emergency because he’s not the mother.

In terms of the men and the children in the film, was there a line for you where you thought, “Oh, I’m making them too annoying, too frustrating, too enraging?” Did you ever feel like you needed to pull it back?

No. If somebody feels that way, that’s none of my business. This is the story I wanted to tell, and the way I wanted to tell it. When a movie comes out or any piece of art is released into the world, that’s what you’re supposed to do. 

Art is a form of communication, whether it’s a painting, a song, a movie, whatever. That’s how human beings have always used art. So I am communicating something, and then I’m putting it out into the world. I also feel, in a postmodern way, that once I put it out into the world, it’s none of my business. It’s not mine anymore. It’s yours. And I trust you. I trust the viewer who comes to see my movie. I trust them implicitly. That’s why I don’t hold their hand. That’s why I ask more questions than give answers. And if somebody feels like it’s too much, that’s okay. It doesn’t scare me, because it’s okay to be uncomfortable. 

It can’t be something that I worry about, or else it would impede what I’m doing creatively. If you’re trying to anticipate what people will think while you’re creating, you’re going to get all muddled up. And I was trying in a very pure way not to do that.

How does that tie into what you said about this being an experiential film? 

There are some things that you consume, and there are some things that you experience. This film is something you experience. You don’t passively consume it. As a viewer, those are the kind of movies that I love best. And I’ve had amazing responses to [the film], so I think people are up for it.

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