‘If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You’ review: Rose Byrne stuns in nauseating thrill ride about motherhood

In If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You, Rose Byrne’s face becomes the close-up canvas for a wildly unsettling comedy-drama. Written and directed by Mary Bronstein — her first feature in 17 years following Yeast— the film follows Byrne as Linda, a mother hanging on by a thread during what appears to be a prolonged nervous spiral. Mirroring her experience, it’s a deeply anxiety-inducing work, whose high-strung energy is owed to a daring audio-visual approach that ought not to be sustainable, but ends up hair-raising and hilarious in the long run. The result, in a word, is excellent.

Through their deft command of drama, Byrne and Bronstein make a formidable pair, as they present the slow demolition of one the most alluringly unpleasant protagonists in modern cinema (alongside Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s Pansy in Mike Leigh’s recent Hard Truths).

The film is as illuminating as it is upsetting, presenting new cinematic dimensions to facets of motherhood rarely touched upon in Hollywood (prior to Nightbitch last year, the most prominent example was arguably Tully back in 2018). At a glance, If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You is Uncut Gems for postpartum depression (it was notably produced by Josh Safdie and longtime Safdie brothers writer/editor Ronald Bronstein). However, its narrative and aesthetic language is entirely its own, from its occasional hypnotic flourishes, to its distressing psychological portrait of a mother on the verge of a nervous breakdown, told almost entirely in close up.

What is If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You about?

You can trace the film’s fantastic dramatic setup across its first four scenes — three of which are therapy sessions of different kinds. Normally, it isn’t worth breaking down a festival release so numerically, but If I Had Legs is so dramatically fine-tuned that each moment feels like an escalation. It begins on a tight close-up of Byrne’s Linda, and stays there for longer than is comfortable. In fact, it gets increasingly claustrophobic, as an off-screen doctor (Bronstein herself) discusses Linda’s care options for her preschool-aged daughter (Delaney Quinn), who eats partially through a feeding tube in her stomach, which Linda insists is unnecessary.

Right from the word go, Linda’s judgement as a mother is in question. However, it’s hard to keep casting aspersions on the character (or at least, to keep them at the forefront of one’s mind) when Byrne delivers such a captivatingly troubled, melancholy, exhausted performance — and from which Bronstein refuses to avert the camera’s gaze. However, when Linda leaves the appointment — a moment that might usually portend a calming interlude — the camera remains fixed on her at an uncomfortable proximity, as her daughter remains beyond the frame, asking repetitive questions, as children do. When they arrive home, there’s still no peace for Linda, with her ongoing domestic cacophony crowned with the chaotic collapse of her bedroom ceiling, forcing her to relocate everyone to a cheap motel.

Linda’s second session, held with her amusingly stone-faced therapist (Conan O’Brien) the next day, clues us into some of her self-destructive tendencies. However, her third and most surprising session is the most revealing. She walks right out of her therapist’s office and down the hall to her own; she’s also a therapist, setting up cycles of advice and therapy-speak that she either gives, or is given, but never adheres to herself. She has the right language, and the right emotional tools in theory, to thrive, but between a traveling husband who berates her over the phone, a doctor who thinks she’s a bad mother, and a daughter who she loves but who needs constant care, she doesn’t have a moment to implement these changes or methods for self-care. 

This desperation is something Bronstein deftly aestheticizes, in ways that feel both prolonged and hyper-active, making Linda’s anguish downright difficult to watch. The movie confronts a woman’s unspoken uncertainties of motherhood in ways that are sometimes repulsive, but deftly-navigated, with tremendous empathy for the movie’s irascible subject.

If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You is an audio-visual gut punch

In a strange but considered flourish, we almost never see Linda’s daughter throughout the film, even though she exists off-screen. Anyone who enters Linda’s orbit onscreen becomes the immediate object of her ire and fed-up tirades: her doctor, her therapist, a nagging hospital parking attendant, and even the motel’s kindly superintendent James (a rare screen role for A$AP Rocky). Some of Linda’s rants are even laced with subtle racial animus; this is hardly an angel to whom Bronstein is trying to endear us.

By not seeing her young daughter quite as completely as these other characters (even the ones she despises), and by speaking to her dismissively, Linda creates a coping mechanism of sorts — a disconnected, passive façade that prevents her from placing her vulnerable child in the same category as these other irritants. She enacts motherhood — as the fulfilment of a social contract — on autopilot, conversing with her kid with the same repetitiveness with which she changes her mechanical feeding bag overnight (a process accompanied by drone-like beeping that weighs Linda down).

It’s hard to shake the sense that not fully engaging with motherhood might not just be a need for Linda, or a survival mechanism, but a secret want she represses. In society’s eyes, the worst thing a mother can do is fail at the Sisyphean trials of parenthood. Perhaps this is something Linda has internalized. It certainly goes hand-in-hand with the guilt she does fully express, over her child’s physical condition and sickness, which only adds to her reasons for not meeting her daughter’s gaze.

However, actually observing other people around her doesn’t mean Linda fully connects with them either. At one point, when she picks up a baby that isn’t hers, the infant’s close up is accompanied by shrill and piercing sound design (by Filipe Messeder) that lasts an eternity. Everyone is, to some degree, an annoying abstraction to her, whether by intent, or by the mere happenstance of her state of mind. This also applies to one of her unstable patients, Caroline (Danielle Macdonald), a new mother who seems on the verge of psychosis, and yet lucidly expresses the same feelings of postpartum doubt with which Linda has been living for so long — but refuses to see (or accept).

As Linda visits her apartment each night to check on the hole in her ceiling, it takes on unexpected physical properties that yield strange visions. This turns the literal and symbolic chasm into something practically metaphysical. Maybe it’s caused by Linda’s lack of sleep, or maybe it’s something deep within her subconscious lashing against the walls of her mind. Either way, the resultant drama is thrilling, hilarious, and upsetting all at once, and it’s largely owed to Byrne’s fearless, fully-embodied commitment to the part.

Rose Byrne delivers a monumental performance

Bronstein knows exactly how to capture Byrne’s nervous energy. The constant close ups keep the character on-edge, as though her motherhood (and her womanhood) were being interrogated, à la Carl Theodor Dreyer’s close up-heavy silent classic The Passion of Joan of Arc.

Just when the camera starts to pull back from Linda’s close ups, promising the briefest of respite, it becomes just as stressful in other ways, with Byrne’s fidgety body language conveying a burgeoning unease. Before long, relentless tight shots become a more desirable alternative, as if the best that we — and that Linda — could hope for is a moment of familiar discomfort, rather than a novel one with unexpected results. 

Where Byrne begins her journey is the kind of fragile emotional place most great screen performances have to carefully build toward. But in If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You, the precipice of total breakdown is the character’s baseline. Touch her and she might shatter — while cutting you in the process.

Things never stop getting worse for Linda, and Byrne’s depiction only grows more frayed. The character’s difficulties build in completely absurd ways, resulting in moments that are as jaw-droppingly funny as they are physically cringe-worthy. It’s the kind of film that’ll make you squirm in your seat while laughing till you almost break a rib. But it’ll also make you want to call your mom, owing to the depths of agony Byrne reaches into, playing a woman who speaks over everyone, and yet, wants desperately to be heard. 

Whether or not she deserves this particular hell is the kind of moral judgement the film practically never allows you to consider. The plot leaps forward with reckless abandon, just as mounting absurdities reach fever pitch, but the movie never breaks away from Byrne’s gradual self-immolation. Her conception of Linda — as a person doing her best, driven to short-tempered cruelty and selfishness by her circumstances — is too multidimensional, and too lifelike, to ever truly be disliked. 

Just like Jean-Baptiste in Hard Truths, there isn’t a single moment during which the torment driving Byrne’s character to lash out isn’t visible behind her eyes, begging to be recognized. It’s a plea made all the more urgent by the fact that If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You feels in a constant state of hair-raising climax. And so, it grabs you by the collar and pulls you along for its harrowing plunge, forcing you to witness — and to understand — the worst yet most deeply human impulses a mother can have.

If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You was reviewed out of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.