Kevin Lally on Film

Screenings at the New York Film Festival have provided a welcome escape from each day’s appalling headlines. And counterintuitively, some of the best escapes have been films focusing on characters riddled with anxiety. Perhaps it’s a sign of the times, but it’s been gratifying to enter the lives of protagonists you’d never trade places with.

Starting with the most stable of the three I’ll be discussing, there’s Nora Borg (Renate Reinsve), the stage and TV actress at the center of Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value. When we first meet Nora, she’s experiencing a bout of stage fright for the record books. Just seconds before she’s to appear, she flees the backstage area, rips her costume, messes up her hair, and wails in despair. Naturally, once she’s persuaded to take the stage, her performance is a triumph. Nora has recently lost her mother and is dismayed when her estranged father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), a noted film director in decline, turns up at the wake. Gustav has an ulterior motive: He’s written a script inspired by his mother and wants Nora to star in it, even though he’s never made the effort to see her work. When Nora turns him down, he offers the part to American screen star Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), whom he meets at a film festival.

Trier and Eskil Vogt’s script is kaleidoscopic, encompassing Nora’s bond with her more grounded younger sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), who starred in one of her father’s films as a child; the sisters’ fraught relationship with their narcissistic dad; Gustav’s creative spark with Rachel; and the tragic history of Gustav’s mother. Even the cozy house that has sheltered several generations of Borgs is a character here. Reinsve, who starred in Trier’s acclaimed 2021 film The Worst Person in the World, is once again engaging and relatable, as is Lilleaas in the less showy part of her sister. And veteran actor Skarsgård is formidable as their wild-card father, who gifts Agnes’s nine-year-old son with a couple of highly inappropriate DVDs. As dysfunctional as they are, you’ll be glad to get to know the Borg family.

Rose Byrne in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

Dialing the anxiety up a few notches, there’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, which you could describe as a horror film that doesn’t need psychotic killers or supernatural creatures. No, the horror here is the crushing demands of motherhood, particularly when your child has a mystery illness that requires attention 24/7—and is a neurotic pain in the ass to boot. Rose Byrne, in a tour-de-force performance, plays Linda, a therapist whose little girl is attached to a feeding tube and whose husband’s job as a cruise captain leaves her without the support she needs. Then her world literally comes crashing down when the ceiling above her apartment collapses and her place is flooded. Linda is forced to take refuge at a shabby motel where, ironically, the super (rapper A$AP Rocky) offers her more sympathy than her own chilly therapist (Conan O’Brien, in his movie debut). Factor in Linda’s distraught patient Caroline (Danielle Macdonald), who goes missing and leaves her with a bawling infant, and no wonder Linda is constantly craving drugs and liquor.

If you’ve ever had “one of those days,” If I Had Legs amplifies that feeling to a comically absurd degree. But it also has something serious to say about the unsung pressures of parenting, especially those of the many valiant parents faced with medical and psychological challenges. Writer-director Mary Bronstein cites David Lynch’s Eraserhead (which also had a quite unsettling child) as an influence on the film’s sometimes surreal nightmare feel, along with her own private personal connection to the script. Byrne, often filmed in intense close-ups, is sensational as the very flawed but heroic Linda, in a performance that finds glimmers of humor amidst an almost Beckett-like endless struggle. Bronstein’s boldest creative decision is to keep child actor Delaney Quinn off-camera until the end of the film; she only registers as a voice making constant demands.

If I Had Legs is an A24 release (opening October 10, 2025), and it’s very much in the idiosyncratic A24 tradition. But Byrne and Bronstein’s collaboration, however nerve-racking, is something to behold.

Lee Byung-hun in No Other Choice

Another character in crisis is Man-su (Lee Byung-hun of “Squid Game” fame) in Park Chan-wook’s wild satire, No Other Choice. Man-su is a manager at a paper mill who’s first seen celebrating his apparently perfect life in a gorgeous country house with his wife Miri (Son Ye-jin), two children, and a pair of golden retrievers. But in short order, his company downsizes and he loses his job. A year later, he’s laboring at a big-box store, while Miri returns to her old job as a dental hygienist. Man-su learns that a position has opened at one of the few prospering paper companies, but his interview with a former subordinate, Choi (Park Hee-soon), is a bust. That’s when Man-su decides he has to bump off Choi—and hatches a scheme to eliminate any potential rivals by setting up a fake website.

Park is celebrated as the director of subversive cult hits like Oldboy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, and The Handmaiden, and his latest is a great showcase for his kinetic visual style and dark sense of humor. (A big part of the joke is that Man-su is not very adept at murder.) Somehow, likeable lead actor Lee maintains our sympathy even as his character becomes increasingly unhinged. His co-star Son is equally compelling as his more level-headed (but almost equally amoral) wife. The screenplay, credited to Park and three other writers, was adapted from a Donald E. Westlake novel called The Ax, filmed previously in 2005 by, of all people, Costa-Gavras. I’d love to see the French version of this very black comedy.

Pictured at top: Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas in Sentimental Value. Photos courtesy of Film at Lincoln Center.