IF I HAD LEGS I'D KICK YOU - Mark Reviews Movies

If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, A24

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 10, 2025

Everything that could go wrong, plus a bit more, does in If I Had Legs I'd Kick You. Writer/director Mary Bronstein's look at the increasing miseries of a married mother and, as a somewhat ironic touch, psychiatrist is equal parts harrowing and amusing. It's those things for the same reason, too. There doesn't seem to be an end to the troubles faced by Linda (Rose Byrne), and they become so much that we can't help but laugh, lest the despair of so many absurd complications and problems overwhelm us in the same way they do Linda.

The situation is already pretty overwhelming for this character from the very beginning. We meet Linda, shot in close-up as the character so often is here, at an appointment with her daughter's doctor (played by Bronstein herself). The daughter, who remains unnamed and quite precisely unseen (Delaney Quinn plays the character), is ill, and any diagnosis or prognosis for the girl is also—again, very specifically—unspoken here. All we know for sure is that the daughter won't eat much, if at all, and has had a feeding tube inserted into her, so that Linda can maintain a steady flow of nourishing goo directly into her daughter's digestive system at night.

As if the stress and strain of this disease and being a caretaker aren't enough, Linda is currently doing all of this alone. Her husband Charles (Christian Slater) is away for work, captaining a ship of some sort, and won't be returning for another six weeks or so. Whenever he calls, he expects details and answers, and Linda, who has spent all day worrying about details and not having any answers, doesn't have the time or patience for her husband's interrogations. She hangs up on him almost reflexively, and Byrne's performance here is so specific that we can almost catch a glimpse of satisfaction when she does end those calls. It is, after all, one of the few things over which she has some control in her life at the moment.

Indeed, Byrne's presence and performance are vital to the film's success, because this character does live in an insulated world of pain, uncertainty, and desperation. As a result, Bronstein does regularly keep the camera close to the character, in order to emphasize how isolated and/or distanced she feels from everything and everyone around her.

To be clear, Linda doesn't want it to be that way. She wants some support from Charles, who only exists as a pestering voice for her in these trying times. She wants answers and a solution from the doctor, who won't even begin to speculate about next steps for the daughter until the girl's weight increases—a prospect that seems progressively unlikely.

Finally, she wants advice from her own therapist, played with straight-to-business curtness by Conan O'Brien, but as one herself, Linda knows as well as anyone that a psychiatrist's job isn't to do the one thing she wants from her colleague. She's so preoccupied with everything, in fact, that she doesn't even make that personal connection with Caroline (Danielle Macdonald), one of her own patients, who recently had a baby and keeps strongly hinting that she has some dark thoughts about what harm might come to her child.

All of this important, of course, but it's also talking around another significant issue that arises for Linda. The family apartment suffers some water damage, which is a gentle way of saying that the ceiling collapses in a flood and crashes through the floor of the master bedroom. That hole in the ceiling starts to have a strange pull of sorts on Linda, even as she and her daughter move into a nearby motel. There, she leaves her daughter alone in the room to get away from the constant beeping of the girl's feeding device, drinks lots of wine, and strikes up a tenuous friendship with the motel's superintendent James (A$AP Rocky), who genuinely seems interested in listening to what Linda might have to say. She's so used to the opposite that she doesn't even seem to notice and treats him mainly with suspicion.

By the way, Linda's fascination with the hole isn't just the frustration of the damage and the construction company taking their sweet time fixing the damage, either. The hole looks like some unnatural thing, with no end in sight and dancing lights filling it when Linda stares long enough into it. As a practical thing, it's another issue on Linda's long list of ones to worry about right now. As a metaphor, that hole starts to have the almost indescribable sense of oblivion—both frightening and, in a strange way, comforting. There's something to that idea later in the film, when another hole transfixes and quickly repels Linda when she stares at it.

The whole film has a nightmarish quality to it—from the unrelenting chain of misfortune, to claustrophobia of those close-ups, to the brief appearance of a pet hamster that almost seems to have it out for its new owners. That's the only way this story could be from Linda's perspective, because it's all about losing the illusion of control, feeling like a continual failure, and not knowing if this is what life is going to be from now on. Some will see and focus on that as an allegory for parenthood, of course, but If I Had Legs I'd Kick You reflects something deeper and broader along the way.

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