The Emotional Architecture of Collapse: Mary Bronstein Selects at Roxy Cinema

With the upcoming release of her new film If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, filmmaker Mary Bronstein is offering more than just a debut — she’s offering a roadmap. In her ongoing curated series Mary Bronstein Selects at Roxy Cinema, Bronstein invites audiences into her artistic lineage through a string of deeply personal, psychologically rich films. Taken together, the series reads like a manifesto, or a cinematic prelude, to the emotional terrain she explores in her own work.

Her selected titles — including Welcome to the Dollhouse, Come Back, Little Sheba, Who’s the Caboose?, and The Watcher in the Woods — share more than cult status or tonal dissonance. They’re united by an interest in female subjectivity under pressure, by a fascination with the ordinary turning eerie, and by performances that mine vulnerability without flinching. These are films that sit in discomfort, that take domestic space and twist it ever so slightly until it becomes unrecognizable. There’s something haunted in them — not by ghosts, but by expectations, failures, and private griefs no one else can see.

Bronstein’s own film — her first since Yeast (2008) — arrives as a kind of culmination of these ideas. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You follows Linda (played with raw precision by Rose Byrne), a mother unraveling amid her daughter’s unexplained illness, an absent husband, and a relentless collapse of both her physical surroundings and emotional stamina.

In curating the Selects series, Bronstein doesn’t just highlight her influences — she maps out a feeling. She shows us the tonal language that underpins her cinema: stories that are funny until they’re terrifying, warm until they curdle. It’s a rare gesture of transparency — a director opening her cinematic diary in the weeks before unveiling her most ambitious film to date. For audiences willing to do the work, watching the curated films before seeing If I Had Legs I’d Kick You will deepen the experience. You’ll enter her new film not just as a viewer, but as a participant in an evolving conversation about collapse, caregiving, and the unspoken cost of holding it all together.

Come Back, Little Sheba (1952) is a domestic drama about a middle-aged, emotionally stifled couple whose quiet life is disrupted when a young female boarder moves in, stirring long-buried regrets and tensions. As the husband battles alcoholism and the wife clings to memories of their lost youth, the film explores themes of repression, longing, and emotional stagnation.

Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995) is a dark coming-of-age comedy about Dawn Wiener, a socially awkward 7th grader navigating the brutal world of suburban adolescence. As she faces relentless bullying at school and neglect at home, Dawn’s journey captures the painful, often absurd struggle for identity and acceptance.

Who’s the Caboose? (1997) is a satirical mockumentary about a New York performance artist and her boyfriend who head to Los Angeles during pilot season, only to get swept up in the absurdities of the TV industry. As their relationship unravels amid Hollywood’s cutthroat opportunism, the film skewers the desperation and vanity of showbiz culture.

The Watcher in the Woods (1980) is a gothic supernatural thriller about an American family who moves into a remote English manor, where the teenage daughter begins experiencing eerie visions and unexplained phenomena. As she uncovers the mystery surrounding a girl who vanished decades earlier, she is drawn into a chilling otherworldly secret.