If I Had Legs I’d Kick You: Mary Bronstein pushes life’s daily irritations to the limit in this dark maternal drama

• Reviewed from the 2025 Sundance Film Festival

It’s been a full 17 years since Mary Bronstein’s crackling debut feature, and the long wait has filtered into the simmering anxieties and ambient aggression of her full-on follow-up. Piercingly funny and far from ingratiating, If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You enters the subjective orbit of a Montauk therapist, Linda (Rose Byrne), as she takes care of her sick daughter in a woeful motel while her boat-captain husband is away. Linda fends off demanding patients, manages her daughter’s demands and carves out time to smoke weed – she’s a fascinating study in refusal or at least withdrawal, whether for individual sanity or something else. 

She is an expert compartmentaliser, to an extent that’s reflected in a stroke of directorial genius: Bronstein doesn’t show her daughter on screen. ‘The Child’ (as she’s credited) is constantly heard but not seen, voicing a steady stream of worries, which are matched by phone harangues from her husband, Charlie (Christian Slater), from the high seas. They end up at the hotel after a torrential flood busts a gaping hole in the ceiling, which entrances Linda. Between trips with her daughter to a treatment centre (under the care of an exasperated doctor played by Bronstein), she visits the dark, damp house as she tries to maintain an insulating distance from her child whenever feasible (and sometimes when not) – all of which can make one think of the film as a baby-monitor-era update to the lurid discomforts of David Lynch’s parent trap Eraserhead (1977).  

Byrne’s nimble performance and Bronstein’s script avoid turning Linda into either a platform for pieties (which 2024’s Nightbitch fell prey to) or a ‘badass’ antihero. She gives as good as she gets, but she’s also nearing the end of her rope, distracting herself with near-daily sessions with her own therapist (Conan O’Brien, quite amusingly deadpan) who is so thoroughly not having it (“Just tell me what to do!” she pleads, and… who among us can’t relate?). The nice super (A$AP Rocky) at the motel, as opposed to the awful clerk (Ivy Wolk), clocks when Linda walks in high and tries to strike up a refreshingly chill, drug-friendly friendship. But she’s soon drawn into drama around one of her patients, an angst-ridden young mother (Danielle Macdonald) who provides an increasingly sobering foil to her own conflicted feelings around motherhood.  

Linda’s daughter (voiced, or upvoiced, by Delaney Quinn) feels like a voice inside her head, an exhausting reminder that she must take care of yet another pressing issue in her husband’s absence. The film radiates a certain sadness, powering along from Linda’s point of view as she tries (and mostly fails) to drift past the world’s daily irritations. Byrne is deft at negotiating this only partly repressed churn of emotions, which feels qualitatively different from Safdie brothers – a comparison that was made frequently after the film’s Sundance premiere. Bronstein fruitfully pushes the limits of characters’ boundaries as she did in her under-seen mumblecore debut Yeast (2008), a poisoned valentine to female friendship in which she starred as an enervating neurotic opposite Greta Gerwig as a bandanaed primo flake.  

There are a couple of moments when the movie hovers at the edge of going down this or that rabbithole, almost literally when Linda sees cinder-like lights in her house’s portal-like ceiling gash. Macdonald’s character too has an unnerving air of hiding an unfathomable secret, perhaps about her baby, and her actions indeed shove the story in a new direction. A scene with a hamster luridly illustrates the constant potential for (somehow antic) disaster facing any parent, but the slight mystery around the portal (which goes beyond the interminable process of repairs) feels oddly ordinary next to the acute psychological observation on display in the film.  

Introducing the film at Sundance, Bronstein described it as a successful transfer “from my head to the screen,” which feels true to how the film straps the viewer right in with Linda. The decision to withhold the sight of the child feels increasingly both bold and natural, steering attention to Linda’s state of mind when convention would dictate that the sick child be an all-consuming focus. And just when the film might be falling into an identifiable rhythm, her inevitable self-reckoning takes us places we didn’t think we would go. Here’s hoping we don’t have to wait another 17 years to find out where Bronstein will take us next.