If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You marks Mary Bronstein’s long-awaited return after her 2008 mumblecore debut Yeast, drawing us into the exhausting life of Linda (Rose Byrne), a therapist struggling to care for her chronically ill daughter in a Montauk motel while her husband (Christian Slater) is away at sea. From the outset, Bronstein narrows the frame around Byrne, making clear that this is no conventional mother-child comedy-drama. The emotional weight of motherhood is conveyed through the daughter’s constant stream of complaints, worries and demands. She never appears on screen, yet her relentless voice (Delaney Quinn) dominates the soundtrack. The rest of Linda’s day-to-day life – strained phone calls with her absent husband, draining encounters with patients, and a hostile, mildly claustrophobic work environment – begins to unfold like a low-grade horror story.

Bronstein treats exhaustion as something that seeps into every exchange and lingers in the silences. Like a one-woman play brought to the screen, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You feels distinctly theatrical in its intensity. The camera clings to Linda with stage-like focus, favouring close-ups in which every flicker of irritation, despair and anger registers. It is a vehicle in every sense, allowing Byrne to carry both the drama and its uneasy comedy through the sheer force of her presence. Meaningful interactions with other characters are extremely limited; apart from Linda’s awkward, faintly bizarre attempts to confide in her aloof colleague (Conan O’Brien), and even those only serve to emphasise her isolation. 

Bronstein’s brand of realism remains harsh and darkly comic, finely attuned to the minor crises and indignities that chip away at Linda’s sanity – an escalating clash with an unhelpful convenience store employee (Ivy Wolk), the nightmarish ritual of her daughter’s night-time feeding tube, with its fluorescent green lights and obnoxious beeping, and the bitter irony of Linda’s own profession as a therapist. Yet the film never settles into strict naturalism – flashes of surrealism surface through abrupt tonal shifts and uncanny details that seem to bend Linda’s reality, as though the pressure she is under were actively reshaping the world around her. In that uneasy space between the familiar and the strange, Bronstein crafts a portrait of modern motherhood that feels at once intimate and destabilising, quietly but decisively resisting expectation.

Christina Yang

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is released nationwide on 20^th February 2026.

Watch the trailer for If I Had Legs I’d Kick You here: