‘If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’ Review: Rose Byrne Astounds in A24’s Nightmarish Motherhood Drama

An exercise in riveting restraint and painful poetry, “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” is an emotional knockout. The latest from writer/director Mary Bronstein, the film stars Rose Byrne as a troubled mother attempting to take care of her ailing daughter while her husband remains absent and her apartment is crumbling. But the plot matters less than the way this story is told.

This is a film that is as witheringly funny as it is disquieting, frequently teetering right on the edge of horror as we feel what seems like the very fabric of the world it creates coming completely apart before our eyes. It’s almost elliptical in nature with time itself proving slippery and scenes colliding into each other like waves crashing on the beach. 

Yet even as you may struggle to keep your head above water, the way it sweeps you up in the overwhelming cacophony of motherhood, loneliness and life’s frequently absurd anguish is an astounding achievement. As all its haunting, unrelentingly stressful scenes accumulate into a work of agonizing art, you only get a chance to exhale once it comes to a close. And yet, you wouldn’t dare consider taking a single moment of the experience back. 

“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” which premiered Friday at Sundance and already secured distribution through A24, begins with Byrne’s Linda returning home with her daughter after a visit to a somewhat hostile therapist. When the young girl, who has an undefined illness and relies on a feeding tube, remarks that water has started to flood the apartment, a giant hole soon bursts through the ceiling. Linda and her daughter must then move into a motel also inhabited by James (A$AP Rocky) and seemingly nobody else. As the solitary mother tries to continue going about her day-to-day, struggling to work with her own clients while talking with her largely uncaring therapist and co-worker, played by a never-better Conan O’Brien whose face always seems right on the edge of a scowl, everything begins to unravel. 

Shot in consistent close-ups by cinematographer Christopher Messina, who previously worked on the spectacular Safdie brothers’ film “Good Time” which shares a stressful energy with this one, “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” feels like a panic attack playing out over nearly two hours. Some of this comes from the recurring visions Linda has, marked by eerie sound design and striking flashes of light.

But what gives the experience its most crushing, suffocating sensibility is the way the film’s more supposedly grounded scenes play out. Marked by a heightened tone, nearly everyone that Linda comes into contact with is cruel right from the jump. Her daughter’s doctor seems to have never heard of the concept of bedside manner and her husband (who we also almost never see) keeps yelling at her over the phone.

This all rests quite heavily on Byrne’s shoulders and she carries it with such fragile poise that you can’t look away. The actress commands the frame as we see the way that Linda’s face starts to crumble, falling further and further until she seems right on the edge of a complete collapse. The focused restraint with which Bronstein captures Byrne compliments her performance perfectly. We almost never break this sense of immersion or the point of view, turning the ethereal, urgent visions of light she has into something as liberating as it is unsettling. Bronstein smartly doesn’t offer any easy answers, providing potential explanations but maintaining an air of mystery. 

Byrne and Bronstein never once compromise in the film’s final act as all the humorous, haunting pieces come together into something disorienting, dizzying, dazzling, and, in the critical last lines, devastating.

After a film spent watching Linda desperately try to care for her daughter and hold her life together, the waves come crashing down again. All you can do is hold onto the resonance that Bronstein offers as you wash ashore. 

“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” will be released by A24.

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