If The Babadook presented the psychological horror of parenthood on Hard Mode, that same level of anxiety is set on Nightmare Mode for If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. It’s the type of film you watch in hopes that there’s some supernatural force or monster to conquer and provide a cathartic goal for the overworked parent pushed to the brink. That symbolic villain never arrives in a film that is one of the most intense depictions of adulthood spinning out of control with nerve-wracking effectiveness and inky dark humor.

Rose Byrne’s performance as the unstable Linda is engaging from the first frame of her extreme close-up, revealing her mental and physical exhaustion. Her life is already messy with a daughter (Delaney Quinn) relying on a feeding tube and a physically distant husband (Christian Slater) reserving his phone conversations with her for beratement. When water damage opens a massive hole in the apartment’s roof, things go from bad to worse. Now relying on a motel for housing her ill daughter, Linda’s anxiety festers deeper as she attempts to fill the void with booze and drugs amid a lingering love for her daughter.

The stressful situation presents several teasers for something to ease Linda’s tension, but that relief never arrives. Her job as a therapist finds her stifling her feelings for professionalism. She only confesses her frustrations to a fellow therapist, played by Conan O’Brien, but he is so tight-lipped that he won’t even entertain her brooding feelings of an affair at work. The motel’s friendliest resident, James (A$AP Rocky), is happy to oblige in Linda’s safety and supply of drugs, but his charity has its limits that Linda will exhaust. There is even the speculation that some greater force of light has caused the hole in Linda’s ceiling, but it’s an investigation that only yields darker memories, laced with his daughter’s constant worrying words and damaging screams. This chaotic nightmare is so viscerally uncomfortable that it’s easy to understand the flight desires of Linda’s most unhinged patient, Caroline (Danielle Macdonald), a mother so uncertain and unsupported that she will find any escape.

To describe everything that goes wrong in this picture, ranging from conflicts at care facilities to a violent encounter with a hamster, may make it hard to stress its comedic aspects. There’s a hysterical nature to how the film keeps going overboard with the stress that you’ll desperately seek any levity. There are thankfully some moments of absurdity, considering the heated exchanges with a motel receptionist, the dry wit of Conan, and the grossly demonic depiction of a hamster so terrifying you’re almost relieved to see it dead. Through it all, there’s a mildly hopeful conclusion about charging forward another day, but never making that realization easy. There must be some biting and screaming against the darkness before picking up the sword for another day. It helps that the film constantly hides the face of Linda’s daughter, acting almost like a tease for some lazy twist of her being a figment of past trauma or not even being her daughter. But she’s not imaginary. She’s Linda real daughter and there’s an empathy within her worth preserving that grounds this surreal descent into psychological terror.

There’s a dangerous level of relatable anxiety within If I Had Legs I’d Kick You that claws its way deep into the psyche. From the anxiousness of the daughter’s pleas to the cruel complaints of parking attendants, the scariest aspect of the film is how real it all feels on several levels. I was amazed at how increasingly I grew uncomfortable with Linda’s situation, yet intrigued enough to see how far this trainwreck will go and how many cars don’t fly off the rails. I admired these perfect performances and had a frightened urge never to return to this film, if only not to relive that level of stress. To borrow a line from Roger Ebert’s review of Naked Lunch, I admire what Mary Bronstein did with her film…and I hate it.

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