If I Had Legs I’d Kick You: Film Review

With an arsenal of disastrous daily inconveniences, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You crushes your nervous system under the suffocating weight of modern motherhood.

Rose Byrne (Insidious) is at her best in the shoes of the film’s protagonist Linda, who is at her worst when faced with a seemingly never-ending flood of catastrophes on a daily basis while having to be the figure who’s expected to know how to handle it all. As her husband (Christian Slater, of Blink Twice) is working away from home, Linda is left to take care of their child with an unknown illness and juggle an impossible number of tasks. She gets by in an almost purgatorial motel, due to a gaping hole in her apartment’s ceiling. As a therapist, she tries to tend to her patients’ concerns, all while having to deal with a straining relationship with her own therapist.

Mary Bronstein meticulously builds disorientation through faintly irritating occurrences that pile up on top of each other until they form the dangerously unstable pillar that is Linda’s life, which could collapse at any second. Interestingly, the pacing of the film never drastically changes to convey the ruthless disintegration of Linda’s mental health with a more conventional “movie structure”. Instead, the narrative traps you into a relentlessly tiresome routine that feels inescapable, with an imminent nervous breakdown looming around every corner. Linda is stuck in her own life without rising or falling action and without a structured resolution to save her from her misery. Chronic stress and heightened anxiety seep into every gaping pore of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, strapping the viewer in for a painfully slow descent into anarchy, emphasized by claustrophobic close-ups and frantic editing.

Occasional cracks in the domestic reality of the film give us hints of surrealistic imagery that enrich our understanding of Linda. There’s a multi-dimensionality to the cinematic language that Bronstein uses to depict a woman left hollow by hardships. Soon after the shocking collapse of Linda’s apartment ceiling, the gaping black hole evolves into a bottomless void that only expands, never closes up. This thematic parallel gives an intriguing angle to the story, though it could have been developed further as a bigger and darker expedition into the lead character’s psyche. The film offers only a few other glimpses into surrealistic territory, but it might as well have gone all the way.

In a grotesque scene involving the feeding tube lodged deep inside Linda’s daughter’s tummy, the analogy of the hole unmistakably exposes a feeling of infinite suffering in silence – a pain that cannot be alleviated by doctors, or contractors, or the father figure in the family. In fact, the pain persists to consume Linda every single time she seeks to be understood and hopelessly fails.

Helplessness reigns over If I Had Legs I’d Kick You to such a high extent that it can leave you numb to its effects. The protagonist’s agency is tirelessly questioned until it brings her to the edge of what she can handle. She seeks solace in her frequenting visits to the therapist (Conan O’Brien), towards whom she feels a complicated ball of emotions. Still, she can’t help but go back to him, as this is the only way she can schedule a break for herself from the madness out there. In his acting debut on the big screen, O’Brien embodies Linda’s contained colleague who likes to bet on a more silent approach in his therapy sessions. However, the overwhelmed Linda can’t let the silence do the work because the answers need to come to her now. She doesn’t ask for help; she demands help out of desperation.

“I just want someone to tell me what to do, and no one will.”

One of the highlights of Bronstein’s anxiety-inducing thriller is a powerful scene of emotional release set against the crashing of tumultuous ocean waves, displaying an aggressive force of nature that keeps thrashing Linda around. The scene boldly synthesizes Linda’s depleting will to keep going and how she is repeatedly knocked down on the ground after grasping for ways to get back up on her feet. It’s a comedic image painted with incredibly dark and existential undertones, which perfectly encapsulate how we all feel when things become a little too much.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You can be too much, and rightfully so. It’s a pulsating portrait of heart-palpitating anxiety that runs on stress and awfully bleak humor, rooted in something tangible and real. Mary Bronstein masterfully utilizes the vocabulary of cinema to convey an exact experience of motherhood and contemporary adulthood in general that is visceral, brave, and nauseating in understandable ways.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You premiered at the Berlin Film Festival on February 17, 2025. Read our Berlin Film Festival reviews and our list of 20 films to watch at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival!