‘If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’ Review: Rose Byrne in a Relentless Descent Into Maternal Panic

The most effective horror films are often those grounded in the everyday—the ones that don’t rely on the genre’s usual clichés but instead use simple audiovisual cues to unsettle and terrify. In fact, the best horror films aren’t “horror films” at all, but stories that magnify the anxieties and discomforts we all experience in real life. After all, it’s far more likely that someone will have to deal with a flooded house and a sick child than with ghosts, zombies, or monsters.

By that measure, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You could be seen as a domestic drama about motherhood—a portrait of a woman forced to cope with a sick daughter, a house literally falling apart, difficult patients, intrusive neighbors, an absent husband, and the suffocating sense that she’s powerless to fix any of it. At this point, Linda’s life (played by an extraordinary Rose Byrne, who won Best Actress at the Berlinale for this performance) is not only chaotic because of what happens to her, but because of how her growing desperation makes everything even worse.

What gives the film its suffocating, horror-like energy is its relentless intensity, sustained from the opening scene. It’s no coincidence that director Mary Bronstein—making her first feature since Yeast (2008)—brought on board Christopher Messina, the camera operator from the Safdie brothers’ Good Time as cinematographer, and her husband, Ronald Bronstein (a frequent Safdie collaborator on Uncut Gems), as coproducer and co-conspirator. The film channels that same raw, jittery nervousness, but through a distinctly female lens and a story centered on experiences more often associated with women.

Linda’s central struggle is her despair and guilt over her (unnamed) daughter’s health. The little girl suffers from a rare eating disorder and, unable to eat, must use a feeding tube at all times. She’s also demanding and intense, which pushes Linda closer to collapse. In one of the film’s most striking formal choices, Bronstein never actually shows the daughter—only a hand, an arm, a fleeting detail, and her persistent, childlike voice. It’s a bold decision that even opens the possibility that the girl, like other elements of Linda’s unraveling reality, might be a projection of her own mind.

As the child fails to meet her medical goals (she’s supposed to weigh 25 kilos, but doesn’t) and Linda’s husband remains away for months working on a ship, new problems pile up: the ceiling in Linda’s bedroom caves in, the house floods, and mother and daughter are forced to move into a cramped motel populated by a handful of strange and unsettling residents.

And that’s only part of it. Linda—who’s also a psychologist—is increasingly unhinged, drinking more and more to dull her anxiety. Her patients are far from stable: one of them, Caroline (Danielle Macdonald), is a new mother so consumed by panic that Linda can’t help but see herself in her. What Caroline does next pushes Linda even further over the edge. She’s supposed to have an outlet for her own issues in therapy sessions with her supervisor (a nearly unrecognizable Conan O’Brien), but those meetings are anything but therapeutic—for either of them.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is an exhausting experience, to the point where one might hate it—or at least feel a kind of irritated admiration for how deeply it gets under the skin. But there’s no denying that it hits a raw nerve, tapping into a fear that many parents will recognize: the sense that nothing one does to hold a family together ever seems to work. Linda has reached a point where she begins to take reckless risks, as if some death drive were compelling her to keep raising the stakes.

Bronstein surrounds her protagonist with an escalating series of external stressors—contractors who never show up, staff who pressure her about her daughter’s condition, clingy patients, and even strangers who won’t leave her alone for a moment of peace in her parked car. She builds a web of potential enemies around Linda, from which only one person—James (played by rapper A$AP Rocky), a neighbor at the motel—shows any genuine sympathy. But even his well-meaning advice leads both of them into murkier territory.

The film has been described as a black comedy, and it may be one, but it plays like the most suffocating horror film imaginable—more unsettling than anything the genre has recently produced. Bronstein occasionally inserts surreal or psychedelic moments where Linda, even in attempts to relax, spirals further into a dark pit of despair, a literal and metaphorical black hole like the one in her ruined house.

While If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is, at heart, a story of motherhood in crisis, it also speaks to a broader, contemporary anxiety—the feeling of being unfit to live in a world that keeps demanding more. In that sense, the film recalls Todd Haynes’s Safe, a quieter but equally disturbing exploration of existential unease. Linda’s troubles may be more numerous and extreme than most people’s, but the sensation of being unable to cope is widely shared. And when it becomes clear that no one can help because everyone is trapped in their own personal nightmare, the only option left is to fight against the current—or, as this film hauntingly suggests, to stop fighting altogether.