If I Had Legs I’d Kick You Review
Mary Bronstein’s sophomore feature starring Rose Byrne is a gut-punch about a woman on the edge of a precipice.
Rose Byrne in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Photo by Logan White. Courtesy of A24
It’s been a long while since Mary Bronstein’s directorial debut, mumblecore comedy Yeast starring herself and a young Greta Gerwig. She returns with If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, a roller coaster of anxiety of the kind I’d expect from the Safdie brothers, who I later found out were connected to Bronstein and the film. She proves herself a master of the craft here, one of the few filmmakers working today who fully exploits the power of cinema as a visual medium.
Rose Byrne stars as Linda, the mother of a young girl (Delaney Quinn), who reaches a breaking point as personal crises mount. Linda’s daughter has an unnamed illness that requires her to have a feeding tube. Linda is already under a lot of pressure, taking care of her daughter while juggling her work as a psychologist, and she’s alone. Her husband (an uncredited Christian Slater) is absent, working at sea, and just doesn’t understand how she’s struggling.
Rose Byrne in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Photo by Logan White. Courtesy of A24
The ceiling of their apartment’s master bedroom caves in suddenly, an incident that sends the already stressed Linda spiraling. The gaping hole, which mirrors the hole in her daughter’s stomach, forces them to move into a motel, a sort of purgatory. New problems exacerbate the crisis for Linda, who is desperate and alone, and things spiral out of control.
Linda struggles to get her daughter to a target weight, a goal that feels impossible because she refuses to eat, as the girl’s doctor (Mary Bronstein herself) threatens to kick the girl out of her hospital program, all while insisting Linda shouldn’t blame herself, “it’s not your fault.” One of Linda’s patients, also a mother, disappears during a session, leaving her baby behind. Linda’s own therapist (Conan O’Brien) is ineffective and a shockingly humorless asshole. Problems keep mounting, and in Linda’s mind, they’re all her fault.
Conan O’Brien and Rose Byrne in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Courtesy of A24
We acutely feel Linda’s anxiety throughout. The film is told entirely from her point of view in an often unsettling, expressionistic way, where it’s sometimes hard to distinguish between what’s real from an externalized depiction of Linda’s anxious perception. A disproportionate number of shots are extended close-ups of Linda’s face, even during action, almost putting us in Linda’s head. The sound design reinforces this brilliantly.
Bronstein made the incredible choice not to show Linda’s daughter. We only see her feeding tube, a constant reminder for Linda of what she sees as her own failure. It’s brutally effective in putting us into Linda’s headspace. The audience isn’t allowed to be swayed by a cute kid.
While the filmmaking is masterful, Rose Byrne carries the movie. She’s onscreen nearly the entire runtime, often with a camera uncomfortably close to her face, and her performance is of a best-in-career caliber. In amazingly inventive casting, Conan O’Brien plays against type as Linda’s awful therapist in his first feature performance. A$AP Rocky is James, an affable, instantly likable motel manager who gets sucked into Linda’s chaos, turning in work better than his performance in Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest. Finally, it’s worth mentioning Danielle Macdonald as Linda’s patient, Caroline, a mother suffering from postpartum depression, who mirrors Linda. Just as Linda isn’t getting real help, she isn’t providing real help to Caroline, either.
The movie shares DNA with the Safdie brothers’ Good Time and Uncut Gems, and it’s no accident. Mary’s husband, Ronald Bronstein, produced the film; he performed in, co-wrote, and edited films for the Safdies.. Josh Safdie is incidentally also a producer here. Cinematographer Christopher Messina, who was a camera operator on Good Time, brings some of that film’s heart-pounding energy with his 35mm film photography.
A$AP Rocky and Rose Byrne in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Photo by Logan White. Courtesy of A24
Also contributing to the movie’s mood is editor Lucian Johnston, who brings his experience editing all the features of another master of unsettling cinema, Ari Aster. This isn’t a horror film, but there are a couple of scenes—horrific and funny—that would feel right at home in one of Aster’s movies, including one of the best body horror moments of the year.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is in the running for my best film of the year, neck and neck with One Battle After Another. This intimate portrait of a woman drowning, depicting a picture of motherhood that we generally don’t see on the screen, is simply brilliant.
If I Hag Legs I’d Kick You opens in select theaters on October 10, with an expanded release on October 17.
