Linda is a psychotherapist stretched to her limits while caring for her daughter, who is suffering from a pediatric feeding disorder. The daughter must be fed through a gastric feeding tube each night and eat enough during mealtimes to gain weight and recover. Her daughter is also enrolled in a day hospital program, which Linda must attend with her. The family's situation takes a turn for the worse when the ceiling in their Montauk apartment collapses, flooding the house. With her husband, a ship captain, Charles, away on an eight-week work trip, Linda is forced to move with her daughter into a shabby motel. Sharing a motel room, Linda struggles to sleep with the sound of her daughter's enteral feeding pump. Sleep-deprived, Linda spends nights outside the motel, drinking alcohol, smoking marijuana, listening to music, and eating junk food. During the night, Linda also leaves her daughter to check on the apartment repairs.
When Charles calls to check-in on Linda, he continues to complain and criticize her, offering no support. Linda avoids meetings with her daughter's doctor in the day hospital program. She is told that if her daughter does not meet her weight goals, her daughter's level of care will be reassessed. Professionally, Linda is surrounded by clients in crisis, including Caroline, a new mother who abandons her baby mid-session. When Caroline's husband refuses to leave work to retrieve the baby, Linda is forced to call the police to report the baby abandoned and Caroline missing. Linda seeks therapy from her own colleague, however, he is increasingly exasperated by her behavior. He eventually declines her as a patient after she repeatedly crosses professional boundaries.
While living in the motel, Linda meets Diana, a snarky clerk, and her neighbor James, a motel superintendent. James helps her buy drugs on the dark web and offers emotional support to her daughter, but their relationship is complicated and ultimately strained. Caroline later appears at the motel lobby, asking for Linda and appearing to be in a state of mental crisis. As Linda tries to speak with her and provide help, she slaps Linda and runs away. Linda pursues, but Caroline ultimately disappears onto a dark nearby beach.
Later, when told that her daughter cannot make the necessary weight for her feeding tube to be removed, Linda takes her daughter to the motel room and removes the tube herself. She then hallucinates the surgical hole closing. When Linda heads back to her apartment, she discovers that Charles has suddenly returned home and repaired the hole in the ceiling. She tries to hide that she left their child alone at the motel, but James tells Charles the truth. When Charles sees that Linda has removed the feeding tube, Linda runs to the beach. There, she repeatedly attempts to drown herself in the ocean, but is thrown back to shore by heavy waves. Linda wakes up on the beach a few moments later, with her daughter looking at her. Linda says she will be better.
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 94% of 154 critics' reviews are positive.The website's consensus reads: "Liable to leave audiences in a cold sweat, this fever dream immersion into parental stress connects with thunderous force thanks to Rose Byrne's gutsy star turn and director Mary Bronstein's uncompromising vision."[19]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 77 out of 100, based on 32 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.[20]
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
