Mary Bronstein Was Always This Good by Isa Barrett

I am highly anticipating the release of Mary Bronstein’s forthcoming A24 feature If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, but in the meantime, I was lucky enough to catch her 2009 short Round Town Girls paired with her 2008 feature Yeast at BAM. I left the theater thinking, how had I not known her sooner? I would have fully modeled my teenage self on this energy. Her sensibility, once too raw for the mainstream, feels alive in a way that demands attention.

Round Town Girls, co-directed with Ronald Bronstein and Amy Seimetz, is a ten-minute explosion of specificity. Two self-invented hooligans who call themselves “Hymen Holoco$t” torment an overly accommodating man and then leave. The humor is sharp, the chaos both familiar and disorienting. The whole thing feels like an artifact, as if you stumbled across a discarded camcorder tape in someone’s basement. In the credits, Lena Dunham is listed as a boom operator. 

Then came Yeast. From the first moments, the film makes you squirm. The camera hovers so close to faces they begin to warp, every twitch and flinch magnified. Rachel’s apartment is so cramped and lived-in that it feels almost unhygienic, a space too intimate for spectators. Bronstein rejects the guardrails of classical storytelling. No character has a clear goal, no scene resolves with a beat of catharsis. The film is not shaped by plot so much as by mood, and that mood is discomfort. Yet it is never alien. I recognized these women instantly.

The premise is simple enough. Rachel, played by Bronstein, reconnects with Gen (Greta Gerwig) and Alice (Amy Judd) over the course of a weekend. They drink, argue, camp, and sulk. Gerwig, fresh out of college, charges into scenes with chaotic vitality, screaming out of car windows in Frye boots and a bandana. Even then, her star quality was obvious. She has the kind of bright presence that makes everyone else on screen sharper, even if it throws their flaws into relief. Bronstein’s Rachel feels needy and rigid next to her, but that tension is exactly what gives the film its force.

My favorite moment comes near the end, after a disastrous camping trip. Rachel and Gen meet in the park. Gerwig sits across from Brostein, who pouts and begins to raise her hand slowly, almost absentmindedly, until a middle finger rests against the side of her face. The audience breaks into laughter. 

There are no dramatic stakes beyond the fragile threads of friendship, yet meaning creeps in from the margins. Jokes harden into cruelty. Conversations collapse into silence. Their bond frays in ways that feel both inexplicable and inevitable. By the end, the connection has thinned to nothing, and there is no reconciliation.

In the talkback afterward, Bronstein explained that she asked her leads to name what they believed the world hated most about them, and then built those qualities into their characters. The method shows. These women feel raw and precise, unvarnished but familiar. They reflect the contradictions we forgive in our closest friends, even when they drive us mad.

The world of Yeast was small, but the names now loom large. The Safdie brothers wander through a scene, bickering about rocks. They were all kids then, making films for two thousand dollars, sneaking into Six Flags to steal an ending shot, improvising a culture that would later define American independent film.

Bronstein herself looked the part at BAM. In the talkback, she wore an outfit that was both classic and punk, tailored yet rebellious. It mirrored her films: uncompromising, alive, unwilling to soften for approval.

In 2008, Yeast seemed quite abrasive for a wide audience. Nearly two decades later, I am eager to see how her filmmaking has evolved. 

Bronstein’s films no longer feel marginal. They feel necessary.

I may have missed her as a teenager, but at 22, I realize she’s already written herself into who I am.