If I Had Legs I'd Kick You

Part of my coverage of the 61st Chicago International Film Festival

IF I HAD LEGS I'D KICK YOU   ***1/2

Mary Bronstein

2025

IDEA:  While dealing with the everyday struggles of raising a chronically-ill daughter, Linda is forced to contend with a massive hole in her ceiling and various other misfortunes. 

BLURB:  Harrowing, bitingly funny, and acutely synced to its protagonist’s spiraling subjectivity, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You sounds a protracted primal scream from a mother at the end of her rope. Rose Byrne’s Linda is a messy cinematic mom of the highest order, a complex figure of maternal ambivalence who at once embodies archaic tropes of monstrous motherhood and feminine volatility and turns them on their heads to expose the psychology underneath. If this mom is going crazy, she’s clearly well within reason, and as her mishaps escalate, Bronstein sharply conveys the social pressures imposed upon women, especially mothers, to serve as caretakers with seemingly unlimited attention and affection to give. But how does one give when they’re constantly being taken from, in a mental death by a thousand cuts? If I Had Legs I’d Kick You renders a woman’s exhausting emotional labor as a madcap nightmare of dissociation, of frayed nerves and attenuated focus and exasperated phone calls to men who can’t understand. In a surrealistic motif, Linda’s psychic unraveling is tied to the gaping hole in her ceiling, a familiar metaphor that grows more layered as Bronstein visually plays with its form and connotations of abjection. Yet the most indelible image in the film is Byrne’s face, almost always shot in febrile closeup as she stares down her gauntlet of trials. Unlike her character, the actress is firing on all cylinders and then some in a performance of searing affective intensity and rich behavioral detail, whether she’s futilely fishing for answers from a stolid Conan O’Brien or failing to take her own advice she gives to a client who is effectively her double. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You feels stretched pretty thin by the time it pays off an iffy visual conceit at its conclusion, but it’s also in that relentless stretch that it evokes the Sisyphean work of maternity. For Bronstein, if there is a kind of monstrousness in motherhood it is par for the course.