Avidavr: Media Reviews

Tag: indie drama films 2025

  • If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025)

    A minor masterpiece of stress, shame, and the feeling that reality is beginning to warp.

    The way Rose Byrne is shot and edited in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You makes her feel like an uncredited fifth character in Requiem for a Dream. If she were in that movie, audiences would be asking where her drugs are—but here, she needs none. Her mental illness behaves like a drug anyway, distorting time and flattening reality. She sees a therapist, though she is one herself. It makes you wonder: is this what my therapist is like when they’re not talking to me?

    Linda’s life collapses quite literally when a hole opens in her apartment ceiling—possibly from flooding, faulty plumbing, or maybe an alien in the walls. The film never clarifies, because Linda can’t. Her grip on cause and effect is slipping. At the same time, she is responsible for caring for her daughter, who can technically eat but refuses food because it feels “squishy,” and who is graded daily on how much she consumes. The entire household revolves around a single goal: getting her weight up to fifty pounds. Linda is never alone, yet utterly abandoned.

    Byrne carries the entire film, delivering a performance built on quiet humiliation and sustained dread. Linda isn’t heroic or admirable; she’s exhausted, brittle, and increasingly convinced she is failing at everything she is supposed to do well. Everyone else feels like a walk-on cameo. Conan O’Brien actually acts, briefly, and his presence reminded me of Dylan Baker in Requiem for a Dream: when someone is unraveling, the most others will do for them is ask a few questions and then discreetly step away.

    For a first feature, director Mary Bronstein shows impressive control. This could easily have been an amateurish mess—a pile of anxiety with no shape—but instead it becomes a low-budget, quietly devastating minor masterpiece. Byrne somehow landed a role most actresses would have killed for, had they known what Bronstein was after. Onscreen, it feels uncomfortably familiar.

    This is what I felt like during COVID.

    8/10

  • Sorry, Baby (2025)

    Sorry, Baby existing at all may be one of the best things to come out of the MeToo movement.

    While the exposure of real monsters—like Bill Cosby and Danny Masterson—showed how power can be abused through drugs, fame, or violence, Sorry, Baby reminds us that none of that is required to permanently damage someone. More than one person I talked to (in real life) called the film “quietly devastating.”

    Its premise is deceptively simple: “Something bad happened to Agnes.” The film never fully shows what that something is, and many viewers may wonder whether the ambiguity justifies a movie at all.  What we learn is enough. Someone Agnes admired desired her for her mind but had no respect for her autonomy. She wasn’t allowed to decide. She was coerced into something she wasn’t ready for. That quiet violation—the kind some people still struggle to even name—is the film’s subject, and it is more than worthy of examination.

    Men can be awful, particularly when entitlement overrides empathy. The film understands that harm doesn’t come from brute force alone, but from insistence—from wanting what you are explicitly denied. Eva Victor, pulling triple duty as writer, director, and lead actor, tells this story with restraint and discomfort rather than spectacle. Sorry, Baby is labeled a dark comedy mostly because it’s too minimal and too emotionally raw to fit anywhere else.

    I laughed at times, but rarely out of joy…more out of tension, desperation, and the human need to feel something break through the numbness. I wanted Agnes to laugh at life again, so I laughed loudly, hoping she might too. Whether or not this story draws from Victor’s own life, it announces a rare talent: someone capable of articulating pain with clarity, intelligence, and moral weight. I hope she finds more stories to tell that live up to this first promise if brilliance.

    9/10