If parenting had an official motto, it would probably be something along the lines of “It isn’t supposed to be like this.” It isn’t supposed to feel like you’re holding on by a thread for years at a time. It isn’t supposed to feel like you’re responsible for everything and capable of nothing. Your partner isn’t supposed to captain a boat somewhere far away for several months on end. Your daughter isn’t supposed to be stricken with a mysterious illness that prevents her from eating. Your condo isn’t supposed to flood at the end of a long day, the leak above the master bedroom suddenly exploding into a hole so big that it soon comes to seem like a portal into the heart of oblivion itself.
Some of these problems are more serious than others, but Linda — a Montauk psychotherapist who’s played by a magnificently unraveling Rose Byrne — has lost whatever was left of her ability to distinguish between a minor inconvenience and an apocalyptic crisis. It isn’t supposed to be like that either. Then again… how else could it be? Life is the most chaotic force in the known universe, and it’s absurd that we’ve allowed the act of establishing it to breed such a host of ultra-rigid expectations.
By the same token, having kids is the awesomest responsibility on earth because you always feel unworthy of it. The Talmud says that “whoever saves one life saves the world entire,” but if that’s the case, it’s only natural that whoever creates life might feel beholden to everyone they meet. And it’s only natural that one of the rawest and most honest movies ever made about contemporary motherhood should be surreal enough to conflate perception and reality in much the same way; that its harrowing-as-hell (but frequently hilarious) portrait of a well-heeled white lady trying to survive a temporary inconvenience should cleave a lot closer to the likes of “Uncut Gems” and “Eraserhead” than it does to, say, “Gilmore Girls.”
More realistic by virtue of its pronounced expressionism, Mary Bronstein’s “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” — her first feature since “Yeast” in 2008, and a far cry from the mumblecore naturalism of her debut — is the kind of film in which the things that should be scary are funny, and the things that should be funny are terrifying. The premise itself is every parent’s worst nightmare, but it’s shaped in a way that makes it feel like a cosmic joke. Which is to say that Linda spends much of the movie locked in a close-up so extreme that everything around her, her unnamed young daughter most of all, seems like a tauntingly disembodied echo of her own anxieties.
The girl is suffering from a strange illness of some kind that requires her to be fed soylent goop through a feeding tube in her abdomen, and Linda feels like it’s her fault that her kid isn’t gaining enough weight to eat on her own. The whole thing would be overwhelmingly sad if not for the fact that Linda’s daughter might as well be a figment of her imagination; played by a high-pitched but endearingly resilient Delaney Quinn, the girl is reduced to a bare shoulder in need of a blanket or a wisp of hair in the rearview mirror of Linda’s car. People say the child looks just like her mom, but that only strengthens the hyper-subjective impression that Linda’s daughter isn’t a person in her own right so much as a human manifestation of her own anxiety.
The gaping wound in the girl’s stomach sets the stage for a story compelled by the sinister and unnatural sight of a hole that refuses to close on its own. The one that erupts from Linda’s ceiling — the first jump-scare in a jittery film that loves to keep you on your toes — actually seems to grow bigger as the days go by, though it threatens to become infinite from the very first time cinematographer Christopher Messina (“Good Time”) plunges his 35mm camera into the infinite darkness of the condo’s drywall, the opening credits unfolding with the same kind of alien wonder that another title sequence once found inside Howard Ratner’s asshole. (It’s a shame that critics like me have made “Uncut Gems” into such a hacky reference point for heart-in-your-throat cinema, because “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” all but demands the comparison, and not only because it was produced by Safdie brothers collaborator Ronald Bronstein.)
Bronstein’s script is too immediate and pressurized to offer any backstory, but it’s clear that the ceiling hole is the straw that breaks the camel’s back, and Linda begins to fray apart pretty fast after that. To some extent, that’s because she’s simply just reached her limit, and every subsequent obstacle or obligation — no matter how small — feels like a full-blown assault, the way that a common cold is enough to kill someone with a failing immune system system. Bronstein renders every scene with an identical level of crisis, until it’s hard to say if you’re watching a series of discrete catastrophes or a single unbroken symphony of distress (an uncertainty maintained by the brain-sawing rhythms of the film’s meticulous sound design, which form their own score of ambient distress as the beeps of the child’s medical devices stalk Linda across town like a thought she can’t forget.)
When Linda moves her daughter into a shoddy beachside motel, borderline purgatorial during the Montauk off-season, the girl at the front desk refuses to sell her a bottle of wine because it’s too late at night. That’s a bummer. When one of Linda’s patients — a dangerously unwell new mom played by “Patti Cake$” actress Danielle Macdonald — abandons her baby in the middle of a session, that’s worse. But to Linda, so manically incapable of mapping her personal agency in the face of a world that feels like it’s spitting at her for sport, everything is equal and all of it’s her fault. Everything is just surreal enough for it all to feel unnervingly realistic. “Anything could be real,” someone says. “Anything could be bullshit, too.”
For Linda, even the good things are warped into horror shows (the scene where Linda buys her daughter a hamster is side-splittingly fucked up), and the people who she turns to for help are so fed up with her that they make her feel beyond saving. That’s especially true of her own therapist, a dead fish of a man who likens Linda to a lab rat who keeps gnawing its own limbs off; Bronstein’s decision to cast the role with a pathological extrovert like Conan O’Brien is a stroke of genius, as there’s a vertigo-like queasiness to watching the funniest man in America fight so hard to smother every conceivable laugh.
O’Brien’s performance can’t help but mine a few killer moments of droll hysteria from his character’s radiating distaste, but it still proves a perfect complement to the down-is-up claustrophobia of a movie in which Linda’s anxiety only makes her less sympathetic at every turn. Just ask James, the easygoing super at the motel where Linda’s staying. Played by rapper A$AP Rocky in a performance that’s instantly likable, grounded, and a million other things that Linda is not, James is energized by his frantic new friend and convinced that it might be fun to bring an uptight mom out of her shell; sex doesn’t seem like an option, but at least they can shop for drugs together on the dark web. Alas, friendship is a tenuous proposition for a woman so thinned by the upkeep of her existence that she can only recognize other people for the obligations they present. For Linda, even an olive branch is asking too much of her.
“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” vibrates with a primordial love and respect for its heroine, one that self-evidently stems from Bronstein’s own experiences as a mother, but the film refuses to wink at its audience or often even the slightest hint of memeable solidarity. There isn’t a moment in this relentlessly subjective movie where Linda’s mind goes blank enough for Bronstein to let us behind the curtain and say, “Everyone on screen might be fed up with this walking disaster of a woman, but I know that you’d find it in your heart to see that she’s hurting.”
Byrne’s caustic and hyper-committed eye twitch of a performance never gives us that chance (few actors have ever been so funny without acknowledging the fact of their own jokes), and even if it did, there’s no evidence to suggest we would know how to help. I’m only so equipped to assess this film as a 4DX-level simulation of maternal distress, but few things have more discomfitingly resonated with my experience as a parent — or more vividly articulated the hapless stupidity of being a dad — than how Bronstein frames Linda’s absent husband in the context of her personal descent into hell. She just wants someone to feel like they’re responsible for her, but it’s hard for men to appreciate what that means in a world that allows them to exist separately from their children; to delegate the minutiae of their day-to-day care in a way that makes it easier for them to keep their eye on the big picture of being a parent, which is just so fucking beautiful with even a half-inch of perspective. Even the distance of a wide shot would do.
“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” doesn’t paint in broad strokes or retreat into the self-satisfaction of forced empowerment, but it spirals towards the very bottom of Linda’s soul with a terminal velocity that feels as incontrovertible and uncompromising as the laws of physics. They always say to put your own oxygen mask on first, but what if you are the emergency? And how is anyone supposed to pull themselves out of such a severe tailspin?
You can feel Bronstein scrambling for a way to resolve this story in a way that doesn’t betray the honesty of its telling, and it’s possible that people might find something pat about the film’s climactic act of self-obliteration. The movie’s most heightened display of body horror gives way to its most constructed moment of sweetness, an abrupt switch in tone that hits you in the face with the strength of a wave crashing down on the shores of the Atlantic. But Linda isn’t looking for an easy way out, and “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” doesn’t give her one.
In a movie that’s haunted by the lyrics of Harry Nilsson’s “Think About Your Troubles,” it might be enough for Linda just to hear them clearly. To remember that everything eventually bubbles back to where it first began, and that everything on this earth has to be swept out by the tides in order for the cycle to continue — exactly how it’s supposed to.
Grade: A
“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. A24 will release it later this year.
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