If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025)

Byrne’s Career-Best Performance Makes If I Had Legs I’d Kick You Unforgettable

In my fantasies, we live in a timeline where actor Rose Byrne has a pair of Academy Award nominations for her uproariously nuanced supporting performances in 2011’s Bridesmaids and especially 2015’s Spy. I’d maybe throw a third one in there for her phenomenal work in 2015’s Juliet, Naked as well, but as I don’t fancy the full film near as much as I wanted to, I wouldn’t put up much of a counterargument as to why I might be wrong (but I’m not — Byrne is extraordinary in the picture, trust me on that).

As much as I adore what the actor did in those three pictures, nothing prepared me for the titanic wallop of watching Byrne melt the screen with her searing, unflinchingly multifaceted performance as Linda in writer-director Mary Bronstein’s bleakly unsettling If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. The story of the mother of a young child (Delaney Quinn) dealing with a strange, potentially life-threatening illness while her husband is away, the actor fearlessly treads into several dark, pointedly unsympathetic emotional corners with determined abandon. Byrne mesmerizes even when her character makes decisions that turn the stomach.

This haunting portrait of a woman — a psychoanalyst struggling to do right by her patients — attempting to do the best she can under impossible circumstances, even as it appears the universe is determined to swallow her whole, is unlike anything else I’ve seen in all of 2025. As difficult as it may be to watch, and as much as it can assault the senses and create an anxiously icky feeling of abhorrent devastation, Byrne’s career-best work makes Bronstein’s first feature-length drama since 2008’s Yeast absolutely essential.

While the concept of an angry outside force trying to consume this harried mother is metaphorical, Bronstein is hardly above making these metaphors as obvious as a gigantic hole appearing in the ceiling of the master bedroom of Linda and her family’s apartment. But that’s how things begin. This impenetrable void dropping pieces of waterlogged installation and shattered scraps of moldy drywall is a harbinger of the budding madness that threatens to destroy everything it sucks into its hypnotically suffocating nothingness. It’s a crystal-clear signal that Linda’s world is on the verge of extinction, and how she — along with everyone who comes into her orbit — deals with it is the primary catalyst that drives the narrative viscerally onward.

This includes her unctuous therapist and co-worker (a pitch-perfect Conan O’Brien), a charismatic fellow resident, James (A$AP Rocky), of the seedy motel she’s and her daughter are forced to move into while their apartment is being renovated, and the perturbed doctor (Bronstein, is a small but pivotal supporting role) who runs a parental support group at the medical clinic treating her child’s illness. There’s also Caroline (Danielle Macdonald), a flustered fellow mother who is one of Linda’s patients and a woman whose post-partum depression is trending toward becoming homicidal.

Bronstein eschews conventionality at every opportunity. She and cinematographer Christopher Messina present practically everything in extreme closeup, and almost all of it is deliberately focused on Linda. It’s a dizzying handheld masterclass in visual disorientation that matches the protagonist’s  increasingly fragile psychological state beat-for-beat. This increases the anxiety level to almost absurd heights and creates an atmosphere of omnipresent dread that is hypnotically smothering.

Almost every character, when seen, is shown from Linda’s point of view, while her daughter’s face is never looked upon until the one millisecond it is needed the most, and that moment is an infuriatingly ethereal gut-punch that is as maddening as it is also oddly empathically soothing. It’s all like some sort of aesthetically bludgeoning stream of consciousness merry-go-round that, once it starts turning, is next to impossible to get off of, and it is only the proclamations of a child’s selfless love that grant any semblance of solace or forgiveness in the wake of all this dizzying psychosis.

It’s hard to watch, Bronstein ratcheting up the tension as if she were making a nihilistic horror movie of unrelenting damnation and not a disquietingly allegorical character study. Additionally, as personal as all of this may be, it also isn’t remotely clear what the filmmaker is attempting to say. Yet, much like everything else here, I can’t help but think this is entirely by design. Bronstein wants the audience to figure out for themselves what it all may mean, the open-ended calamity of the final sequences signaling the birth of a fresh start, the calamity of ruinous self-destruction, or something perplexingly in-between.

Through it all, Byrne anchors these events with shattering determination. Because of her, this performance hit me like an anvil dropped from a great height, like something out of a Road Runner or Bugs Bunny cartoon. Because of her, I’ll be thinking about and pondering this feature for a very long time to come. Because of her, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is nothing short of unforgettable.

Film Rating: 3 (out of 4)