In If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You, Rose Byrne’s face turns into the close-up canvas for a wildly unsettling comedy-drama. Written and directed by Mary Bronstein — her first function in 17 years following Yeast— the movie follows Byrne as Linda, a mom hanging on by a thread throughout what seems to be a protracted nervous spiral. Mirroring her expertise, it’s a deeply anxiety-inducing work, whose high-strung vitality is owed to a daring audio-visual strategy that ought to not be sustainable, however finally ends up hair-raising and hilarious in the long term. The outcome, in a phrase, is great.
By means of their deft command of drama, Byrne and Bronstein make a formidable pair, as they current the gradual demolition of 1 essentially the most alluringly disagreeable protagonists in fashionable cinema (alongside Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s Pansy in Mike Leigh’s latest Onerous Truths).
The movie is as illuminating as it’s upsetting, presenting new cinematic dimensions to sides of motherhood hardly ever touched upon in Hollywood (previous to Nightbitch final yr, essentially the most outstanding instance was arguably Tully again in 2018). At a look, If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You is Uncut Gems for postpartum melancholy (it was notably produced by Josh Safdie and longtime Safdie brothers author/editor Ronald Bronstein). Nonetheless, its narrative and aesthetic language is totally its personal, from its occasional hypnotic prospers, to its distressing psychological portrait of a mom on the verge of a nervous breakdown, advised nearly totally in shut up.
What’s If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You about?
You may hint the movie’s improbable dramatic setup throughout its first 4 scenes — three of that are remedy periods of various varieties. Usually, it isn’t value breaking down a competition launch so numerically, however If I Had Legs is so dramatically fine-tuned that every second appears like an escalation. It begins on a good close-up of Byrne’s Linda, and stays there for longer than is snug. Actually, it will get more and more claustrophobic, as an off-screen physician (Bronstein herself) discusses Linda’s care choices for her preschool-aged daughter (Delaney Quinn), who eats partially via a feeding tube in her abdomen, which Linda insists is pointless.
Proper from the phrase go, Linda’s judgement as a mom is in query. Nonetheless, it’s arduous to maintain casting aspersions on the character (or a minimum of, to maintain them on the forefront of 1’s thoughts) when Byrne delivers such a captivatingly troubled, melancholy, exhausted efficiency — and from which Bronstein refuses to avert the digital camera’s gaze. Nonetheless, when Linda leaves the appointment — a second that may often portend a chilled interlude — the digital camera stays fastened on her at an uncomfortable proximity, as her daughter stays past the body, asking repetitive questions, as youngsters do. Once they arrive house, there’s nonetheless no peace for Linda, together with her ongoing home cacophony topped with the chaotic collapse of her bed room ceiling, forcing her to relocate everybody to an inexpensive motel.
Linda’s second session, held together with her amusingly stone-faced therapist (Conan O’Brien) the following day, clues us into a few of her self-destructive tendencies. Nonetheless, her third and most stunning session is essentially the most revealing. She walks proper out of her therapist’s workplace and down the corridor to her personal; she’s additionally a therapist, establishing cycles of recommendation and therapy-speak that she both provides, or is given, however by no means adheres to herself. She has the appropriate language, and the appropriate emotional instruments in concept, to thrive, however between a touring husband who berates her over the telephone, a health care provider who thinks she’s a foul mom, and a daughter who she loves however who wants fixed care, she doesn’t have a second to implement these modifications or strategies for self-care.
This desperation is one thing Bronstein deftly aestheticizes, in ways in which really feel each extended and hyper-active, making Linda’s anguish downright tough to observe. The film confronts a girl’s unstated uncertainties of motherhood in methods which can be generally repulsive, however deftly-navigated, with super empathy for the film’s irascible topic.
If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You is an audio-visual intestine punch
In an odd however thought-about flourish, we nearly by no means see Linda’s daughter all through the movie, regardless that she exists off-screen. Anybody who enters Linda’s orbit onscreen turns into the speedy object of her ire and fed-up tirades: her physician, her therapist, a nagging hospital parking attendant, and even the motel’s kindly superintendent James (a uncommon display function for A$AP Rocky). A few of Linda’s rants are even laced with refined racial animus; that is hardly an angel to whom Bronstein is attempting to endear us.
Mashable High Tales
By not seeing her younger daughter fairly as fully as these different characters (even those she despises), and by talking to her dismissively, Linda creates a coping mechanism of kinds — a disconnected, passive façade that forestalls her from inserting her weak youngster in the identical class as these different irritants. She enacts motherhood — because the fulfilment of a social contract — on autopilot, conversing together with her child with the identical repetitiveness with which she alters her mechanical feeding bag in a single day (a course of accompanied by drone-like beeping that weighs Linda down).
It is arduous to shake the sense that not absolutely partaking with motherhood may not simply be a necessity for Linda, or a survival mechanism, however a secret need she represses. In society’s eyes, the worst factor a mom can do is fail on the Sisyphean trials of parenthood. Maybe that is one thing Linda has internalized. It definitely goes hand-in-hand with the guilt she does absolutely specific, over her youngster’s bodily situation and illness, which solely provides to her causes for not assembly her daughter’s gaze.
Nonetheless, really observing different folks round her doesn’t imply Linda absolutely connects with them both. At one level, when she picks up a child that isn’t hers, the toddler’s shut up is accompanied by shrill and piercing sound design (by Filipe Messeder) that lasts an eternity. Everyone seems to be, to a point, an annoying abstraction to her, whether or not by intent, or by the mere happenstance of her mind-set. This additionally applies to considered one of her unstable sufferers, Caroline (Danielle Macdonald), a brand new mom who appears on the verge of psychosis, and but lucidly expresses the identical emotions of postpartum doubt with which Linda has been dwelling for thus lengthy — however refuses to see (or settle for).
As Linda visits her residence every night time to examine on the opening in her ceiling, it takes on surprising bodily properties that yield unusual visions. This turns the literal and symbolic chasm into one thing virtually metaphysical. Possibly it’s attributable to Linda’s lack of sleep, or perhaps it’s one thing deep inside her unconscious lashing towards the partitions of her thoughts. Both method, the resultant drama is thrilling, hilarious, and upsetting unexpectedly, and it’s largely owed to Byrne’s fearless, fully-embodied dedication to the half.
Rose Byrne delivers a monumental efficiency
Bronstein is aware of precisely methods to seize Byrne’s nervous vitality. The fixed shut ups maintain the character on-edge, as if her motherhood (and her womanhood) had been being interrogated, à la Carl Theodor Dreyer’s shut up-heavy silent traditional The Ardour of Joan of Arc.
Simply when the digital camera begins to drag again from Linda’s shut ups, promising the briefest of respite, it turns into simply as nerve-racking in different methods, with Byrne’s fidgety physique language conveying a burgeoning unease. Earlier than lengthy, relentless tight pictures grow to be a extra fascinating different, as if the very best that we — and that Linda — might hope for is a second of acquainted discomfort, slightly than a novel one with surprising outcomes.
The place Byrne begins her journey is the form of fragile emotional place most nice display performances should rigorously construct towards. However in If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You, the precipice of complete breakdown is the character’s baseline. Contact her and she or he would possibly shatter — whereas reducing you within the course of.
Issues by no means cease getting worse for Linda, and Byrne’s depiction solely grows extra frayed. The character’s difficulties construct in fully absurd methods, leading to moments which can be as jaw-droppingly humorous as they’re bodily cringe-worthy. It’s the form of movie that’ll make you squirm in your seat whereas laughing until you nearly break a rib. But it surely’ll additionally make you wish to name your mother, owing to the depths of agony Byrne reaches into, taking part in a girl who speaks over everybody, and but, desires desperately to be heard.
Whether or not or not she deserves this explicit hell is the form of ethical judgement the movie virtually by no means means that you can contemplate. The plot leaps ahead with reckless abandon, simply as mounting absurdities attain fever pitch, however the film by no means breaks away from Byrne’s gradual self-immolation. Her conception of Linda — as an individual doing her finest, pushed to short-tempered cruelty and selfishness by her circumstances — is simply too multidimensional, and too lifelike, to ever actually be disliked.
Similar to Jean-Baptiste in Onerous Truths, there isn’t a single second throughout which the torment driving Byrne’s character to lash out isn’t seen behind her eyes, begging to be acknowledged. It’s a plea made all of the extra pressing by the truth that If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You feels in a relentless state of hair-raising climax. And so, it grabs you by the collar and pulls you alongside for its harrowing plunge, forcing you to witness — and to know — the worst but most deeply human impulses a mom can have.
If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You was reviewed out of the 2025 Sundance Movie Pageant.
