Review: If I Had Legs I'd Kick You

At some point in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Rose Byrne’s Linda looks her therapist square in the eye and mutters, “I need to be alone.” It’s not a request, it’s a mantra. The line echoes through Mary Bronstein’s nerve-shredding, darkly comic descent into maternal madness, a film so claustrophobic and relentless it makes Uncut Gems feel like a mindfulness retreat. To be a mother here is to be devoured by responsibility, abandoned by those who swore to help, and left to scream into the void, while someone asks if you remembered to buy more diapers.

Bronstein’s film joins a growing chorus of what you might call “unfiltered motherhood cinema”, films like Tully, The Lost Daughter, and Nightbitch, but this may be the most emotionally raw and visually scabbed-over of them all. Byrne’s Linda is not transforming into a canine or flashing back to a time before she had children; she’s simply unraveling in real time, bleeding out from a thousand invisible cuts.

Linda is a therapist, a mother, and, most urgently, a woman standing on the absolute edge of reason. Her daughter is sick, though what exactly ails her is never explained. The child is almost entirely off-screen, a silent presence rendered in pale limbs and shallow coughs. Her husband (Christian Slater) is heard only through nagging voicemails. Her therapist (an unexpectedly perfect Conan O’Brien) offers more exasperation than empathy. And the ceiling of their home has literally caved in, forcing her into a mildew-scented motel room and a daily routine soaked in dread.

The metaphor here isn’t subtle, but it doesn’t need to be. The ceiling is a gaping wound, a moldy black hole leaking viscous water, and possibly something darker, into the softest corners of Linda’s life. The film’s sound design turns every drip into a drumbeat of doom, and its unsettling score coils around your ribcage like a panic attack you can’t exhale. This is horror by accumulation: late bills, missed appointments, forgotten feedings, a bottle of red wine cracked open at noon.

Byrne gives a performance that’s almost too much to take in a single sitting, raw, biting, and full of nervous electricity. It’s the kind of turn that dares you to look away and punishes you if you do. With her smeared makeup and nicotine-cured voice, she’s a study in functional collapse. One moment she’s holding a client’s baby, the next she’s screaming at her therapist in the hallway, then silently puffing a one-hitter in the dark beside a dumpster. You never doubt her love for her daughter, but that love has become a pressure cooker with no release valve. She’s not just losing it, she’s already lost it and is now cataloging the aftermath.

There’s a scene midway through where Linda, after a long and brutal day, walks off into the dusk with a bottle in one hand and a joint in the other. It’s one of the few moments of peace she gets, and even then, it ends in awkward chaos with James, the sweet motel manager played by A$AP Rocky. He’s charming, grounded, and clearly drawn to Linda’s wreckage, but Bronstein wisely resists any romantic framing. Their connection is a passing ember in a world of cold embers and broken smoke detectors.

Bronstein’s writing is jagged and laced with dread, but there’s also biting satire beneath the grime. A pediatric doctor chirps “It’s not your fault!” while threatening to drop Linda’s daughter from treatment. Her patients grow wary of her unraveling sanity, and even her supposed safe spaces, the therapist’s couch, the bathroom floor, the backseat of her car, begin to feel like traps. There’s a moment involving a clogged drain that sent a jolt of communal disgust through the theater.

The film denies us a traditional catharsis. We don’t learn much about what broke Linda before the story begins, and even the eventual appearance of her daughter’s face, deliberately withheld until the final scene, feels less like a revelation and more like a reminder: this child is real, and so is the toll. We are not watching a monster; we are watching someone who has run out of exits.

Bronstein introduced the film at Telluride by asking two questions: “What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?” and “What’s the worst thing that happened to you today?” The genius of If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You is that it blurs the line between those answers. For Linda, and for many women like her, the worst day is every day.

This isn’t a film you revisit for pleasure. It’s a film that stains you. While it runs too long, it's impact isn't diminished. Like Linda herself, it demands your full attention and then refuses to reward it with redemption or neat emotional closure. What it offers instead is honesty, brutal, messy, black-mold honesty. It’s not about how strong mothers are. It’s about how close they sometimes come to breaking. And the real horror? No one notices until the ceiling caves in.

4/5