by Helen Barlow
A brief report from the 75th Berlinale
Ever since Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You premiered in Sundance, the film’s Australian star Rose Byrne has been heralded for her performance as a mother and therapist in all kinds of trouble, with critics already putting her forward for an Oscar nomination in 2026.
“Oh, it all feels so far ahead, I can’t even imagine being in that position,” Byrne says at the film’s Berlin press conference. “For now, it’s just such a joy to share and show this movie.”
In an unusual move, the Berlin Film Festival has given the Sundance film a competition berth which means Byrne is up for best actress here when the prizes are awarded next Saturday.
The incredible aspect of Byrne’s performance is that she’s seen mostly in close-up as her Linda character deals with snowballing crises including her daughter’s mysterious illness, her patients suffering in peculiar ways and a massive inundation in her apartment that forces her to relocate to an unpleasant hotel.
“It was so clear to me the expression of these feelings and it’s hard to be too literal about it, because it’s something that’s beyond the dialogue,” Byrne says. “What I love about the language of the movie is whether it’s actually happening like this or happening through Linda’s eyes like this. That line of reality is so interesting and fascinating to explore, particularly through the eyes of a woman and a mother, which is not something we always get to see.”
“By the end of the movie, she has dark raccoon circles (around her eyes) and she looks gone, she looks so pale,” notes Bronstein, who admits that she was not interested in realism. She wanted to be “behind Linda’s eyeballs” so there was nowhere to hide.
“Oh, you’re gonna be that close?” Byrne recalls asking her. “I just kind of adjusted with the help of the camera department. For me as a viewer, to see the final product was more than I could have imagined. It was truly so compelling, and I felt strapped to my seat. The script is so rich and full.”
The film was shot over 37 days with what they describe as ‘not a grand budget’. Beforehand, the pair were lucky to spend two months discussing the script and discussing their own life experiences which helped the film come together fast.
Meanwhile, Byrne’s American partner and the father of her two sons, honorary Australian Bobby Cannavale, looks dapper in a bigger role than expected as the bartender dishing out booze to Ethan Hawke’s Lorenz Hart in Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, another Berlin contender.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
After Justin Kurzel’s fine film The Order screened in Venice and only streamed on Prime Video here, the Australian filmmaker turned his sights to creating a five-part series based on Richard Flanagan’s 2013 novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which took out the 2014 Booker Prize.
Last Saturday, the series had its world premiere at Berlin’s prestige Zoo Palast where Kurzel was clearly moved to see the first two episodes on the big screen. He noted how Flanagan is a good friend, who gave him free rein to do as he wanted. He dedicated the series to Flanagan’s father, whose experience as a POW during World War Two inspired the novel, and also to his screenwriter Shaun Grant’s grandfather who also was a POW and had worked on the Thailand Burma railway; and to his own grandfather who had been one of the Rats of Tobruk.
The story follows an Australian doctor, Dorrigo Evans, over three time periods. He’s first played by Jacob Elordi as a young man navigating his love life and then enduring the horrors of war as an Army medical officer in Syria in 1941 and ending up in Thailand in 1943 as a POW of the Japanese, helping construct the Thailand Burma railway. Ciaran Hinds plays the character later in life as a wealthy successful Sydney surgeon, whose memories of the atrocities as a POW resurge as he promotes a book of artwork from the time by one of the soldiers.
Naturally, the difficulty for critics was in only seeing the first two episodes and watching various storylines interweaving over different time periods. A representative from the German broadcaster Sky told us that they are only allowed to screen the first two episodes before the Australian release on 18 April and that further episodes are sometimes brutal. The series was shot in two sections with a gap to allow the young actors to lose weight and to look emaciated and we get to see some of that in the first episodes.
