If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (dir. Mary Bronstein)
Certificate: 15
Running Time: 113 mins
UK Distributor: Picturehouse Entertainment
UK Release Date: 20 February 2026
WHO’S IN IF I HAD LEGS I’D KICK YOU?
Rose Byrne, Conan O’Brien, Danielle Macdonald, Christian Slater, ASAP Rocky, Ivy Wolk, Daniel Zolghadri, Delaney Quinn, Ronald Bronstein, Lark White, Josh Pais, Eva Kornet, Mark Stolzenberg, Helen Hong, Ella Beatty, Manu Narayan, Amy Judd Lieberman
WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?
Mary Bronstein (director, writer), Ronald Bronstein, Eli Bush, Richie Doyle, Conor Hannon, Sara Murphy, Josh Safdie and Ryan Zacarias (producers), Christopher Messina (cinematographer), Lucian Johnston (editor)
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
A pressured woman (Byrne) deals with life as it comes crashing down on her…
WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON IF I HAD LEGS I’D KICK YOU?
Motherhood is stressful. A blanket statement, sure, but it doesn’t make it any less true, even for mothers who have it way easier than others. The constant pressure of catering to the demands of one’s children, especially those too young to truly think for themselves, while also trying to balance your own commitments as both a parent and an actual human being can send anyone into a deep spiral of psychological turmoil, one that only seems to end when said children finally reach adulthood and possibly go on to experience parenthood for themselves.
In writer-director Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You – a curious title, not just for its macabre expression but also for the fact it’s not even a line of dialogue, let alone an act that ever occurs – being a mother is depicted as probably the most thankless task one could be saddled with, and with her extremely unnerved approach the filmmaker presents it as more terrifying than most of the recent horror movies you may have seen.
Rose Byrne plays Linda, a woman who has been left alone by her husband Charles (Christian Slater) – who’s away on an extended work trip – to care for their young unnamed daughter (Delaney Quinn). A simple enough task under normal circumstances, except the child is suffering from a mysterious illness that requires her to have a tube inserted into her stomach at all times, leading to regular hospital appointments where the doctors simply refuse to further treat her unless Linda makes more family counselling appointments.
As if that wasn’t enough, Linda’s daughter – who, and it’s important to note at this point, we always hear but almost never see – is extremely high-maintenance, whining about small unimportant things and demanding her mother’s constant attention, whether it’s a simple gesture of love or wanting to get a hamster for a pet. As if that wasn’t enough, Linda is a therapist who is having difficulty managing patients such as Caroline (Danielle Macdonald), a clearly mentally unwell mother who abruptly abandons Linda – and her newborn baby – midsession, while receiving zero helpful advice from Conan O’Brien as a fellow therapist who always seems annoyed to even be in her presence. And as if THAT wasn’t enough, a giant hole appears in the ceiling of her apartment, forcing mother and daughter to temporarily move into a shoddy motel where the rude receptionist (Ivy Wolk) isn’t nearly as off-putting as the manager James (ASAP Rocky) whose good-intended concerns constantly give off creepy-nice-guy vibes.
I could go on forever with how many problems Linda faces in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, but if at some point reading the above paragraph you felt a severe bout of anxiety swirling inside of you, then that’s exactly how you’re meant to feel. Bronstein creates an unusually claustrophobic world comprised of constant tight close-ups where you can practically see every crevice and wrinkle on characters’ faces, leaving you with as little breathing space as Linda does whilst she unravels in real time, so overwhelmed by the life she is seemingly trapped in that there’s no telling what she’ll do in order to break free from it (if, indeed, she can). The filmmaker externalises her slipping mental state in drawn-out scenarios that constantly push both her and the viewer closer and closer to the edge, with a harrowing sense of doom that grows by the second within a manic pace that barely slows down for you to take it all in, leaving you just as emotionally and psychologically drained as Linda is.
Byrne, in a career-best performance, firmly holds your attention as her character’s fragility becomes more and more apparent, and her fuse grows shorter and shorter. The actor absolutely nails the constant feeling of being squeezed like a zit until her innards come gushing out, enduring so much chaos from the moment we first lay eyes on her that you almost wonder if she experienced some kind of panic attack whilst filming, because there’s no way any sane person would be able to handle such heavy emotional weight without losing their mind at some point on set. Yet, Byrne holds herself together in a remarkably fine-tuned turn that sees her exploring so many levels with this character, most if not all of them worrying to some degree since this is a person who, at first out of morbid curiosity but later on out of close consideration, absorbs a story about a similarly overwhelmed mother who ended up murdering her own children.
Whether or not anything like that actually occurs in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is far from the point, as Bronstein’s film is designed first and foremost as a nerve-wracking exploration of motherhood that is so dense with its depiction of what being an overworked parent can be like that, were such a morbid thing to happen here, it wouldn’t be entirely out of the ordinary. It even gets surreal in places, with holes such as the giant gaping one in her apartment becoming a recurring motif that represent a deeper venture into Linda’s evaporating sanity, though such moments can sometimes seem a bit too abstract in their feverishly artsy vibes (it’s in moments like this where you can definitely tell that this is an A24-backed movie).
But with its phenomenal lead performance holding it all together, the film works well as a stressed-out look at what being a mother can actually mean. To be safe, though, maybe refrain from suggesting this for a Mother’s Day watch.
SO, TO SUM UP…
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You offers an extremely stressful look at motherhood and all its excess baggage, its overwhelming and occasionally abstract filmmaking held together by Rose Byrne’s fantastic lead performance as a mother always on the verge of insanity.
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