Sundance ‘25: 'IF I HAD LEGS I’D KICK YOU' – Rose Byrne is Remarkable in This Maternal Panic Attack of a Movie

Two hours of uncut existential dread and a career-best turn from Rose Byrne, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You from writer-director Mary Bronstein is an uncomfortably intimate character study of a mother unraveling under the weight of her daughter’s medical issues and a gaping ceiling leak threatening to drown what’s left of her sanity. Byrne has long mastered the art of self-loathing and performative pleasantries (see her Apple TV+ series Physical for a masterclass), but she’s operating on another level here. As Linda, she’s barely holding together her personal and professional life in this cortisol-spiking, secondhand-stress-inducing domestic drama.

Linda isn’t just the mother of a chronically ill daughter shuttling between hospital visits—she’s also a mental health therapist, actively spiraling into her own mental health crisis. As a therapist, she’s distracted, disengaged, and dancing on the edge of ethical malpractice. Her clients problems mostly pale in comparison to hers, though one is also struggling under the weight of being a new mother and their sessions go off the rails. Her own therapist—a nonplussed Conan O’Brien in a rare dramatic turn (still deadpan funny, of course)—becomes the unfortunate witness to just how profoundly unmoored she is.

Constant calls from her absentee husband (Christian Slater)—berating her over botched contractor negotiations and perceived parental incompetence—only compound her stress, reinforcing the gnawing belief that she’s failing at everything. This is further exacerbated by the cold and bureaucratic hospital staff who foist further anxiety upon Linda.

The camera stays uncomfortably tight on Linda’s face, trapping us in the claustrophobic tension of her razor’s-edge existence, capturing every sharp breath and involuntary wince. Linda’s discomfort with her life—being a wife, a mother, a professional—is only exacerbated by the fact that everyone around her can see she’s unraveling and yet remains completely unsympathetic. She’s on an island, underwater, surfacing just long enough to gasp for air, with no lifeguard in sight.

There’s no score to buffer the nerve-shredding anxiety of Linda’s existence; just a relentless symphony of medical machines and baby monitors trilling and beeping into the void. Adding to the sense of distance, we never see her daughter. We hear her voice, but she remains intentionally out of frame in every interaction, heightening Linda’s isolation, and perhaps her longing for a life where she was never a mother at all. Where peace once lived, there’s only guilt and shame. Guilt for not doing enough. Shame for not wanting to do it at all. She’s pushed into hospital group therapy in an attempt to manage these feelings, but the experience only makes them more inescapable.

A curious supernatural undercurrent runs through If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, most notably in the eerie mirroring of the apartment’s gaping hole and the medical tubing flooding fluids into the hole in her daughter’s belly. When the lights flicker and suggest that something else is in the room with the hole and her, Linda reaches into the darkness, calling for her mother—a bitter irony, given her torment at being forced into motherhood herself.