If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (USA, 2025)
I had a miserable time watching If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, but not in the way the movie intended. Mary Bronstein’s second feature-length film follows a mother, Linda (Rose Byrne), as she spirals into madness while struggling to care for her mysteriously ill daughter—whose condition has no known treatment—while her husband is away for work, her therapist is extremely unhelpful, and her own patients are adding to her stress. To make matters worse, the roof of her room collapses (and there’s nothing worse than suddenly having all your clothes and bed soaked in water), forcing her to stay in a cheap motel for a few days.
The film is relentless in depicting the worst possible week a mother could endure, aiming to create the same suffocating exhaustion as Eraserhead or a Safdie brothers thriller. And while it boasts an Oscar-worthy performance from Rose Byrne, it lacks the inventive style of those films, mistaking sheer misery for profundity far too often.
Every conceivable thing that could go wrong in Linda’s life does, piling on with no breathing room. Bronstein seems intent on portraying motherhood as an endless cycle of stress and suffering. If you’re on the fence about having children, this film won’t push you toward the idea. If the goal was to make parenthood feel like an unrelenting nightmare, it succeeds—but there were far subtler, more effective ways to explore that theme without feeling so overbearing.
Bronstein’s unsubtle approach is evident from the opening scene, a long, agonizing take of Linda receiving bad news from her child’s doctor, in a shot reminiscent of the final frame of Pearl. The film reaches an emotional level of 11 within the first 20 minutes and refuses to budge. The difference is that a movie like Uncut Gems also starts at 11, but by its climax, it has escalated to 59. Here, the intensity plateaus, and what initially feels overwhelming eventually just becomes numbing.
Despite all the struggles Linda faces, the film lacks a sense of progression. The challenges keep piling on, but they don’t deepen the story or Linda’s character. The roof collapse in the first act, for example, is presented with such extreme intensity that most of the film—visually or emotionally—fails to match it until the climax. As a result, the narrative feels oddly static, despite the constant turmoil.
The saving grace is Rose Byrne, who does her best to navigate these narrative obstacles. She fully commits to Linda’s despair, but the film keeps her locked in that state for nearly the entire runtime. It would have been far more compelling to see a gradual emotional unraveling rather than a character who starts at rock bottom and has nowhere else to go. The supporting cast, including Conan O’Brien in an unexpectedly serious role and especially A$AP Rocky, delivers solid performances, but the script rarely allows them to feel like fully realized people.
A film about a mother descending into madness while struggling alone to care for a child with a mysterious illness has the potential to be deeply unsettling and emotionally raw—something that captures the real, all-consuming terror of such an experience. But If I Had Legs I’d Kick You undermines itself by cranking everything to the extreme from the outset, rarely allowing moments of light or nuance to balance its heaviness. There is no love or kindness to be found. The result is an exhausting experience that becomes numbing rather than affecting.