‘If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’: Watch Rose Byrne Descend Into Maternal Madness

PARK CITY, Utah—Contrary to its title, everyone in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You has their appendages. Rose Byrne’s protagonist, however, does have a wealth of problems and neuroses, and writer/director Mary Bronstein dives into her headspace with a full-bore intensity and immediacy that’s bracing at first, and wearisome by the end.

A portrait of a mother under constant siege, this grueling film—which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival—boasts an admirably committed performance from its lead. Unfortunately, it devolves into such a morass of shrill chaos and affected symbolism that it’s difficult to feel anything other than exasperation with its central maternal crisis.

Bronstein’s camera gazes at Linda (Byrne) as she speaks with a doctor about her young daughter’s (Delaney Quinn) severe, undefined medical issue, all as the girl begs her to not burst into tears. That’s a futile request, since Linda is, from her opening close-up, a woman on the verge of a catastrophic breakdown, her nerves frayed beyond repair and her fury stoked by the fact that, regardless of which way she turns, she receives no reprieve from her misery.

Away on business and thus leaving her to fend for their unwell child, Linda’s husband (Christian Slater) refers to his work trip as “time off.” Her therapist (Conan O’Brien) offers her few answers and just as much compassion. And her clients—since she too is a therapist, working in the same office as her own shrink—are a collection of messy misfits, including a guy who regularly dreams about Linda kissing him and a mother, Caroline (Danielle Macdonald), who’s sure that her infant son is in great danger and therefore in need of her extreme over-protection.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’s central conceit is that Linda’s daughter is unnamed and her face is never seen; Bronstein instead merely teases her profile via glimpses of her feet, hands, and ears. The reason for this storytelling denial is never properly explicated, although the further Linda falls into a pit of despair and mania, the more it appears to be a reflection of her disassociation and inability to see her daughter and, by extension, herself.

Linda is beset by paternal anxieties, including guilt over both her responsibility for her child’s injury—which now requires that she be hooked up nightly to a feeding tube—and for her unkind thoughts about the girl. At the same time, she bristles at having to take endless responsibility for her charge, fighting with Dr. Spring (Bronstein) over care and refusing to make an appointment to discuss the next steps for treatment (which sound like vague threats directed at Linda), and clashing with the clinic’s parking lot attendant, who has no patience for Linda’s selfish habit of blocking traffic by double parking in front of the building entrance.

Linda is a tornado of angst, insecurity, and loathing (for herself and others), and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You certainly evokes her condition in unsettling fashion. Bronstein’s camera is often pressed up against her main character’s face as she frets, panics, fumes, and zones out due to exhaustion born from lack of sleep and an overworked mind, body, and soul. Byrne inhabits her fully and ferociously; there’s never a moment when you don’t sense her pain or understand her frustrations and fears, at least in the abstract.

However, the film’s willful withholding of basic details—such as what’s wrong with Linda’s daughter—quickly goes from intriguing to aggravating. Compounding that shortcoming are hallucinatory visions of sparkling lights, glowing rings, smoky clouds, and shrieking voices that are tiresomely obtuse, and recur so frequently that the proceedings begin to splinter.

There’s a story of sorts in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, and it begins in earnest when Linda’s apartment floods due to a giant hole in her bedroom ceiling that materializes out of nowhere and forces her to relocate with her daughter to a dingy motel. There, Linda spars with the front desk clerk over wine purchases, strikes up a bizarre relationship with fellow resident James (A$AP Rocky), who encourages her to buy drugs on the dark web, and routinely abandons her daughter to get drunk and high at an outdoor fence.

She additionally gives into her kid’s incessant, annoying pleas and buys her a hamster, only to have the creature prove fiercely bitey, instigating an incident that strains for humor. This bedlam is exacerbated by her troubles at work, which are highlighted by Caroline abandoning her daughter in Linda’s care—a crime that’s related to Linda’s own conflicted feelings about being a mom.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a frenzied first-person vision of motherhood and its numerous burdens and battles, but its strident pitch grows less tolerable with each freak-out. Linda screams at her MIA husband on the phone, blows up Dr. Spring’s parent-therapy session by claiming full responsibility for her daughter’s malady, and takes James to her apartment to see the hole. That orifice, it’s ultimately revealed, is related to her daughter’s ailment, further casting the material into a void of signifiers.

Byrne captivatingly captures Linda’s desperation. A little bit of her hysteria, though, would have gone much further than the endless craziness that defines her tale, whose pedal-to-the-metal pace keeps things frantic even as the narrative drags its way to a disappointingly obvious conclusion.

Amidst this insanity, O’Brien plays against type as an unfunny therapist who begrudgingly puts up with Linda’s madness, yet going against the grain doesn’t result in anything very interesting. And as Linda’s daughter’s physician, Bronstein never quite decides if she wants to be appealing or irritating. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a whirlwind that sucks up everything and spins it around until there’s simply across-the-board disarray. Regrettably, that also goes for its plot, whose scenes are jammed together with the same bludgeoning force that characterizes Linda’s final attempt to flee her anguished existence.

At times recalling Alice Englert’s Bad Behaviour in its fascination with off-putting mothers, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You fails to make its pandemonium amusing. The best it can do, ultimately, is so convincingly convey the unpleasantness of its protagonist and her predicament that it makes one pine to escape her company.