If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
(2024 | USA | 113 minutes | Mary Bronstein)

It’s a facile comparison given the involvement of a Safdie brother (Josh) on the production team, but Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You very much has the feeling of Uncut Gems for motherhood (a film that her husband Richard co-wrote). I mean this as a very high compliment to Mary Bronstein’s incredible nightmare of a film that surged to the top of every conversation at Sundance after its premiere in Park City this January and now hits wide theatrical release just in time for Spooky Season.

As Linda, a unspooling mom taking care of a young daughter with special needs, Rose Byrne lives up to the immense festival hype. Hers is a tremendous performance from an actor who doesn’t always get her flowers; here she rises to the impossible challenge of holding every uncomfortable frame. Often filmed in extreme close-ups, we meet her as the sky is falling (almost literally), her kid won’t eat, and her husband’s away at sea for months at a time, leaving her as an increasingly frazzled solitary caregiver.

Forced out of their home due to a massive flood that explodes through their ceiling, she, her daughter, and all of the medical equipment necessary to keep her child meeting caloric goals relocate to a shabby seaside model. Staffed by a perpetually unpleasant clerk (Ivy Wolk, hilariously over it all), the motel’s most relatable neighbor (A$AP Rocky) is more friendly than Linda deserves, but also looking for help securing substances from the Dark Web.

Even when she’s holding it together amid these trying circumstances, it’s clear that it’s only at a surface level. Her network of support is limited to her husband yelling at her on the phone (the perfectly cast voice of Christian Slater), her therapist refusing to get pulled into her drama (hilariously dry Conan O’Brien), and her daughter’s school nurse is constantly haranguing her to schedule a meeting to talk about how to get her kid to reach her milestones for weight gain. She self-medicates at night, has major lapses of judgement, gets overly entwined in other people’s crises.

Situating us more deeply in Linda’s fraying psyche, Bronstein keeps the whining child offscreen, such that we hear her complaints, pains, and (frankly) emotional manipulations. Linda cares deeply about the kid, but because we never see her, our allegiances are more firmly situated with a mother trying her best but coming up short. Bronstein’s vantage — an imperfect mother reckoning with love for her kid but also loathing in the face of failure — is rare air, as the pressures build, she allows some uncanny breaks from reality to situates even deeper in Linda’s unraveling. Unafraid to dwell in the intentionally uncomfortable dynamic, the film takes the onslaught of stresses of renovation, motherhood, and the demands of her work work (the early reveal of her job is one of the film’s funniest surprises) as an occasion to spiral through delirium as very poor life choices mount. None of this would work, or frankly be as relatably funny and consistently compelling through the litany of psychological tensions, without Rose Byrne’s sensational performance at its heart. Never pleasant, it’s still a masterpiece of the darkest humor of ever unfolding domestic horrors.

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We originally reviewed If I Had Legs I’d Kick You when it played as an official selection of the Premieres program at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It opens this weekend at SIFF Uptown.