If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You is one of those films everyone needs to see. I left the screening at the Rio Film Festival shocked, and it took me days to digest everything Mary Bronstein builds here. It’s a film that pierces you—not by shouting, but by exposing with precision and irony what it means to be a woman (and mother) in a state of collapse.
Mary Bronstein doesn’t just film a woman on the verge of collapse—she films the collapse itself. In If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You, Rose Byrne plays Linda, a mother, psychologist, and survivor of a daily life that seems to conspire against her. The ceiling literally collapses, and the metaphor couldn’t be more obvious—and more painfully real. After water floods the apartment, Linda is forced to move to a motel with her sick daughter. Her husband is always absent, her therapist seems more interested in provoking her than helping her, and the whole world seems to demand balance when all she needs is five minutes of silence. Life falls apart in slow motion—and somehow, she still has to cope.
The film, distributed by A24, is a dark comedy that feels like a domestic nightmare. Mary Bronstein films the chaos with surgical precision: the close-ups, the suffocating close-ups, the frames that cut through the air. The visual absence of her daughter—who appears only with a fragmented body, feet, hands, and ears—is a brilliant gesture. The child exists, but the focus is on the mother, and that changes everything. If we saw the girl completely, we might forget to look at Linda—and that is precisely what the film is about: the woman who disappears behind the role of mother.
Rose Byrne is monumental. Winner of the Silver Bear for Best Actress in Berlin, she balances exhaustion, despair, and irony with a delivery that seems to emerge from a trance. In her every expression, there’s guilt and resistance, shame and love. Byrne doesn’t play the “good mother”—she plays the real woman, who wants to love but also wants to escape. Who loves silence as much as she fears loneliness. Bronstein’s script, at once cruel and funny, has a humor born from the absurdity of routine. “If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You” isn’t just a provocative title—it’s a muffled cry from all the women trying to sustain a home, a job, a child, and their own sanity.
The director plays with genres: there’s drama, there’s comedy, there’s a light psychological thriller tone. And amidst it all, a stark portrait of contemporary motherhood emerges—a motherhood riddled with guilt, shame, and exhaustion. The perfect mother is a fiction as dangerous as the ceiling that threatens to collapse. The film asks a silent question: are we all born to be mothers? And an even more uncomfortable statement: being a woman is, in itself, a form of resistance.
In the end, “If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You” leaves a feeling that lingers in your body. It’s impossible to leave feeling the same. Because after watching Linda, you’ll never look at your mother—or yourself—the same way again.
You’ll find “If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You” at the Rio Festival.
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