‘If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’ Review: Rose Byrne Blows The Roof Off Of Mary Bronstein’s Delirious Take On Modern Motherhood [NYFF 2025]

We should get this out of the way now: I’m not a parent. I have two parents, but like most children of adults, I took the fact that they essentially kept me alive for the first significant chunk of my life for granted until I grew up (and fucked up) enough to realize that I owed them a debt of gratitude. I complain aplenty about my own perpetual exhaustion, but I can’t imagine what it must have been like to wake up at 3 a.m. to a screeching infant in the other room, a small human that has none of the social/mental capabilities to communicate why it is upset. I certainly can’t imagine handling those responsibilities alone, nor how impossible it would seem to tend to the needs of a child who has been plagued by an illness that requires her to be hooked up to a perpetually-beeping-and-feeding machine since she was born. Even with functioning legs, that’s one hell of a hill to climb, no matter how much you love who waits for you to arrive at the top.

This is also worth mentioning early on: Linda (Rose Byrne) has legs in Mary Bronstein’s delirious spiral down the hell hole of parental absurdity, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, and they work just fine. But they might as well refuse operation on a daily basis given how many of these aforementioned uphill battles she’s forced to fight, daughter with a feeding tube included. The child (Delaney Quinn, who is literally credited as “Child”) could be described as whiny, but given how little she can do for herself, it’s hard to say her grievances aren’t warranted. It’s just as difficult to argue that Linda’s incessant frustrations with her situation aren’t justified, or that she should feel eased in the slightest by the assurances from the hospital’s family therapist (Bronstein) that Linda isn’t to blame for her daughter’s condition, or that the half-assed “advice” her own therapist (a brilliantly-cast Conan O’Brien) provides on a weekly basis is worth the money. That Linda is a therapist herself helps not; even shrinks need some personalized analysis every now and then, especially when her husband (Christian Slater), who should theoretically serve as a baked-in support system, is a ship captain who is literally never not at sea. 

At least Slater’s uncredited father is safe on board: Byrne’s Linda is drowning in the turbulent abyss of her daily life, where she is forced to balance child care, a slew of needy patients (one of whom, played by Danielle Macdonald, is a severely detached mother of a more dangerous variety), and – oh, right! – the fact that the ceiling in her master bedroom caved in a few nights ago, forcing the still-ashore mother-daughter duo to live out of a seedy Montauk motel run by James (A$AP Rocky, continuing to prove his prowess as a performer on the heels of Highest 2 Lowest). Don’t let this frenzied info dump mislead you, though: If I Had Legs isn’t the Safdie-coded anxiety trip that so many have been eagerly reducing it to being, likely a cause of its writer-director being married to Ronald Bronstein, Josh and Benny’s co-writer on everything from Daddy Longlegs to Uncut Gems. Byrne’s leading turn in Bronstein’s first film since 2008’s Yeast might inspire comparison to Adam Sandler’s work in the latter Safdie film, but the similarities stop with the desperation both characters have for something – anything – to turn in their favors. 

If I Had Legs is a hectic jaunt unto itself, one that may share a distributor and a last name with one of the parties who co-wrote Good Time et al. but charts its own way forward, one that is specifically crafted to capture the frontlines of motherhood, particularly the stress that only a one-sided parenting relationship can bring about. It’s hardly coincidental that most of the characters surrounding Byrne’s Linda don’t have names, dialing home the fact that this woman is unraveling at a rate that will eventually result in loose threads stranded across the floor where there once was a spool. Bronstein creates a world within Linda, not necessarily around her, and If I Had Legs unfolds almost entirely from her singular perspective. No, this isn’t Nickel Boys, but if Bronstein’s cinematographer Christopher Messina had shot the film in a POV format, the Linda-induced motion sickness would send the audience packing long before its climactic gross-out sequence had the chance to.

This is a film that is uniquely devoid of hope (complimentary), a picture that eternally barrels toward the end of the world without a safety net deployed at the edge and succeeds entirely because of it, not to mention how perfectly it deploys Byrne, who finally gets free rein here after having long been a terrific screen presence without a proper leading role. The tendency to reference an actor’s previous roles as influences on their latest makes for lazy criticism, but the good news regarding Byrne’s work in If I Had Legs is that it has no predecessors residing in her filmography. This is a refreshing, exhilarating performance that seems to have come from depths previously unknown, and it should be celebrated rather than reduced to comparisons. 

The same goes for Bronstein’s film, though there’s a question regarding a lack of opportunities for growth, luxuries it never really permits its principal character to explore, given how swiftly it slams its pedal to the metal. The sky isn’t falling here: It has already fallen, and as it turns out, plenty more sky was hidden behind the layer that now lies in a mess on the floor, the kind that doesn’t seem like it will ever be clean, not really. How long is it until the rest of the sky falls? Bronstein continues to hint at it as a possibility, but the payoff doesn’t match the stakes she’s laid out for her sophomore feature, as if the film doesn’t know where else to go once it’s (repeatedly) reached the point where most sane folks would throw in the towel, familial obligations be damned. 

Even still, making something as frequently gripping and relentlessly draining as If I Had Legs requires a stunning amount of confidence, no matter how much weight viewers are bound to wish they could remove from Linda’s shoulders. “It isn’t supposed to be like this,” Linda says about parenting, yet it’s a line that could theoretically apply to Bronstein’s film as well. Perhaps that’s what makes it land so hard, so crushingly, and so euphorically. Even when we think we know everything about something – whether it’s parenting or filmmaking – there’s always more to see, and even more to learn.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You will debut in select theaters on October 10, 2025, courtesy of A24. The film will expand nationwide on October 24th.