If I Had Legs I’d Kick You ★★★
- 2filmcritics
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Availability: No longer in theaters, although it might return when Oscar nominations are announced. On major online platforms, such as Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV. For full rental and purchase options, see JustWatch here.
“Mommy is Stretchable”
Beleaguered is the word that comes to mind for Linda, the Montauk, New York woman at the center of writer and director Mary Bronstein’s 2nd feature-length film. Besieged would also be appropriate, or inconsolable, or traumatized. Or depressed, desperate, comfortless, hostile, morose. All of the above. From beginning to end.
The child’s face is not shown until the end of the film.
Though married, Linda (the 46-year-old Australian actress, Rose Byrne) is presented as a single mother; her pilot husband (mostly present through the unsympathetic telephone voice of Christian Slater) is away for weeks at a time. Linda is left alone to care for her dangerously underweight 8-ish daughter (Delaney Quinn), whose unidentified illness requires that she sleep with a beeping machine and a feeding tube in her abdomen and be constantly monitored. The unnamed child is petulant, demanding, uncompromising, apocalyptic (“we’re gonna die”)—a walking thesaurus of obnoxious and irritating qualities. To avoid the viewer (and Linda) identifying too strongly with a cute little one, the child’s face is not shown until the end of the film.
Rose Byrne, here in the light of the motel office window, clutching her bottle of wine along with a baby monitor, is compelling as Linda, a woman falling apart from the stresses of difficult parenting.
Though the trauma and guilt of special-needs motherhood is the core of Linda’s despair, the child is not the only problem. A second-floor flood in Linda’s home produces a gaping, surreal, nightmarish hole and requires evacuation to a bare-bones motel. The parking-lot attendant at the child’s clinic is an enforcer rather than a helper. The snarky clerk at the motel demands ID when a harried Linda needs a bottle of wine. The child’s physician (played by Bronstein) is threatening (“we’ll have to reassess the care plan”) and although she says the right words—“it’s not your fault”—lacks any real empathy. A contractor hired to fix the ceiling takes a week off and, when Linda complains to the landlord, he hangs up on her.
Even motel neighbor James (charismatic A$AP Rocky) has trouble connecting with the alienated Linda. (Note the no alcohol sign on the motel fence.)
Conan O'Brien, right, plays
against type as Linda's icy,
appropriately nameless, therapist.
Nothing good can come from Linda’s giving in to the child’s insistence on a pet hamster. And when motel neighbor James (charismatic A$AP Rocky, “Highest 2 Lowest,” 2025) appears to offer friendship and understanding, Linda lacks the emotional bandwidth to reciprocate. Linda is Job. Contrived and orchestrated and unremitting, it’s all a bit too much.
“Maybe I got rid of the wrong one.”
Everyone seems to have a therapist these days (not to mention a personal trainer), and Linda has one, too. In fact, Linda is a therapist—more about that later—and her therapist, another nameless character we’ll call Conan (Conan O’Brien, playing against type as wonderfully icy and self-absorbed), is conveniently just down the hall from her office. Conan the therapist is neither affable nor funny, and for Linda, anyway, he’s ineffectual, though he does elicit Linda’s disturbing confession after her description of an early abortion: “Maybe I got rid of the wrong one.” Like all the (too many) therapy relationships in the film (there are at least 3 others), this one is troubled and broken by the personal feelings that can develop between patient and therapist (“I love you,” says Linda quietly as Conan leaves the room).
Linda (Byrne), right, is a therapist herself, here with her client Caroline
(Danielle Macdonald), whose deep post-partum depression over her baby Riley
(covered in the baby carrier center), mirrors many of Linda's emotions.
As if this weren’t enough, Linda’s difficulties with her child are mirrored with a vengeance in Caroline (Danielle Macdonald), one of her patients whose newborn has her in deep, neurotic, postpartum depression. Caroline’s over-the-top response to her situation in some respects parallels Linda’s. Another patient, Stephen (Daniel Zolghadri, whom we’re always interested in seeing; “Funny Pages” [2022], “Lurker” [2025]), imagines that Linda has the hots for him. It’s pretty clear that therapy—for Linda or anyone else—isn’t the answer.
Linda’s radical isolation reflects contemporary concerns with loneliness.
There is no answer. “If I Had Legs” offers a problem without a solution. That spares us the saccharine ending, but it also turns the issue back on itself with unrelenting intensity, as if the problem at hand were hopelessness itself, rather than a dysfunctional mother or a particularly difficult motherhood. Linda’s radical isolation—no husband, no family, no friends, no helpful acquaintances, no corner bar, no workspace-as-respite, all exacerbated by her lack of resilience—reflects contemporary concerns with loneliness (“Friendship,” [2025], “All of Us Strangers” [2024], “Fallen Leaves” [2023], “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” [2020]), but in a way that’s as unhelpful as the brittle advice of her child’s physician.
Linda's child's physician, portrayed by the writer and director herself, Mary Bronstein, center, leads a therapy group of mothers dealing with children facing severe illnesses.
With "IT'S NOT YOUR FAULT" AND "BLAME + SHAME" on the blackboard,
she has the right concepts, but exudes no shred of empathy.
For all its over-determined excess, the script has one positive result: it offers Rose Byrne one emotive opportunity after another, emotions that seem more natural, a type of neo-neorealism, than Jessie Buckley’s in the recent “Hamnet.” Though all those moments are within a spectrum awash with anguish, anxiety, and grief, colored by accumulating exhaustion, Byrne’s performance is worthy and compelling, a haunting portrait of a woman not only “under” the influence, but crushed by it.
He says: Rose Byrne’s performance may be worth sitting through this unremittingly bleak film. Maybe.
She says: A truly haunting and difficult watch. The closest I’ve come to being this emotionally engaged in the world of impossible parenting since reading Andrew Solomon’s incredible “Far From the Tree” (2012).
Date: 2025
Director: Mary Bronstein
Starring: Rose Byrne, Mary Bronstein, Delaney Quinn, Christian Slater, Conan O’Brien, Danielle Macdonald, Daniel Zolghadri
Runtime: 113 minutes
Country: United States
Language: English
Other Awards: 30 wins and 63 other nominations, most for best actress and breakthrough director
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