If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
With her husband on his third of eight weeks away for work, Linda (Rose Byrne) is finding it increasingly difficult to deal with the demands of caring for their child (Delaney Quinn, "The Roses") who isn't responding to treatment for an illness which requires administering a feeding tube. Then she has to move them and her daughter's medical equipment to a motel when a pipe bursts, flooding their apartment and leaving a giant hole in the ceiling, exposing asbestos and mold. We'll witness Linda in therapy before realizing that she, herself, is a therapist and one of her patients, new mother Caroline (Danielle Macdonald, "Patti Cake$"), in her same state of mind, disappears, leaving her infant in Linda's office in "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You."
Laura's Review: A-
Writer/director Mary Bronstein ("Yeast") plunges us into Linda's psyche, an avalanche of escalating anxiety over the course of almost two hours that, thankfully, is frequently hilarious in its situations and Linda's reactions to them, providing periodic release. Cinematographer Christopher Messina amplifies her vision with extreme close-ups (the first shot is comprised of Byrne's face from her eyes to the tip of her nose), with sound that makes her daughter heard, but not seen, Quinn's voice unnaturally elevated on the soundtrack. Bronstein so effectively gets her audience into Linda's mental state, we find ourselves losing perspective along with her, an unreasonable motel desk clerk's (Ivy Wolk, "Anora") refusal to sell a bottle of wine as catastrophic as a disappearing contractor.
In last year's "Nightbitch," Amy Adams dealt with the stress of motherhood by running with a pack of dogs at night, but Rose Byrne's character is dealing with stress from multiple angles and while she may get bitten by a hamster, her imagination instead plunges her into a void represented by the increasingly large hole in her bedroom ceiling, mirrored by the surgical one in her child's abdomen. We encounter Linda as her daughter's voice comes in and out of her consciousness, asking over and over that there be no cheese on their pizza, before the camera pulls back and we see its box land upside down on the sidewalk. Linda's reaction is controlled, hiding her irritation by playfully declaring her daughter a witch who willed the upset to remove the cheese, but they are no sooner home, Linda stuffing a slice into her mouth, when her daughter calls from the bathroom, reporting water in there. Linda is shocked to see multiple inches of it, expanding into her bedroom, where the ceiling caves in just as she enters.
Linda becomes increasingly short when her husband calls, his going to a minor league baseball game received as an insurmountable offense. Her daughter's pleas for a hamster are rejected until the animal can be used as a bribe, only for it to meet a horrific fate when Linda is rear-ended (by Josh Pais in a cameo). Dr. Spring (Bronstein) keeps pressing her for a meeting which Linda interprets as her not having done enough for her daughter and the parking attendant (Mark Stolzenberg) at the clinic who keeps telling her she cannot idle in front of the building becomes enemy #1 while her motel neighbor James (A$AP Rocky, "Highest 2 Lowest"), who keeps trying to help her, is summarily rejected until she learns he is a conduit to drugs. Linda makes increasingly distraught demands of her therapist (a steely-eyed Conan O'Brien), thinking she's in love with him as one of her own clients, Stephen (Daniel Zolghadri, "Funny Pages"), relates dreams where she keeps kissing him. She treats Kate (Ella Beatty), another, with growing disdain, silently judging the young woman's problems as insignificant, but it is Caroline, who sounds so much like herself, whom she fails, just as she believes she is failing her own daughter by leaving her alone in their room to escape into a bottle of wine or to smoke a joint back in their apartment.
After creating a psychological maelstrom, Bronstein caps everything off with a deluge of consequences, beginning with the unexpected arrival of a very concerned Charles (Christian Slater) who isn't at all what we expected given Linda's reception of his phone calls. A nearby beach and the waves crashing onto its shore symbolize the feeling of being overwhelmed, of being dragged under. Rose Byrne, dark circles signaling her exhaustion, is a walking nervous breakdown, a character begging for a lifeline, her performance an endurance marathon. Her supporting cast surprises, especially O'Brien, whose initial impatience boils into fury over his colleague's unprofessional behavior with A$AP Rocky as her empathetic motel mate and Danielle Macdonald as a meeker representation of her own therapist. Delaney Quinn, whose full face is never seen throughout the film, becomes a ray of hope in its final scene, that face angelic.
It is always important to recognize that people we may interact with whose behavior seems unexpected in a negative way may be going through something unimaginably difficult in their lives. "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You" is a portrait of a care giver at the breaking point and Rose Byrne is a marvel in it.
A24 releases "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You" in select theaters on 10/10/25, platforming on 10/17/25 and 10/24/25.
