Right from the start, A24’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You takes a big stylistic swing.

Directed by Mary Bronstein, the film centers on Linda (Rose Byrne), a woman who must juggle caring for her sick daughter (Delaney Quinn) and dealing with a collapsed ceiling in their apartment. Throughout it all, her husband, Charles (Christian Slater), is away on an extended work trip and heard only over the phone. Similarly, Linda and Charles’ daughter spends most of her time out of frame in scenes with Linda, so audiences only know her voice, not her face.

In an interview with Mashable Entertainment Reporter Belen Edwards, Bronstein, Byrne, and Slater discussed the decision to visually isolate Linda from her family members and how it felt filming Linda’s phone conversations with Charles.

“It was suitably frustrating and stressful,” Byrne said. “This lends itself to what the scenes are.”

“The voiceover scenes, I think they represent the distance in the marriage,” added Slater, who recorded his scenes remotely, adding to the sense of Linda’s isolation.

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As for why audiences don’t see Linda’s child, Bronstein explained the reasons were twofold.

“One is conceptual, which is that we’re in Linda’s reality the whole time, and she cannot see her daughter as a little girl,” Bronstein explained. “She can only see her as something that’s being put upon her, that’s that’s victimizing her, that’s a burden.”

She continued: “Then, in a manipulative way, I also know that if you introduce the face of a child into these scenes where Linda is doing the kinds of things that she’s doing, the sympathy is going to go to the child. And I wanted, in a very radical way, for the audience to stay with Linda.”

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is now in theaters.