IF I HAD LEGS I’D KICK YOU (2025) review
written by: Mary Bronstein
produced by: Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein, Eli Bush, Richie Doyle, Connor Hannon, Sara Murphy, Ryan Zacarias
directed by: Mary Bronstein
rated: R (for language, some drug use, and bloody images.)
runtime: 113 min.
U.S. release date: October 10, 2025
“I can’t help it if in my dreams you always want to kiss me.”
The elitist movie snobs among us will have you believe that one of the things that made the New Hollywood era great was the influx of (almost exclusively male) protagonists that were difficult, if not impossible, to root for. Heck, critics are falling all over themselves right now in celebration of Timothée Chalamet’s incredibly unlikable protagonist in “Marty Supreme,” so the tastemakers’ tastes rarely change.
As one of those snobs, however, I couldn’t help but wonder why films with unlikable female protagonists are almost always ignored by audiences (and often critics). “Die My Love” died at the box office a few weeks ago, but that film is intentionally, almost confrontationally uncommercial.
However, another, I think slightly better film that arrived around the same time was Mary Bronstein’s “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.” This film has one heck of a hard protagonist to root for in Rose Byrne’s Linda, but the film manages to wring a lot of pathos and dark comedy out of her predicament.
At first, Linda is incredibly empathetic. She’s dealing with a sick child who has some unspecified intubated feeding disorder, a husband who’s off for several weeks on business, and a pipe just burst, flooding her apartment, and forcing her and the child (and all of the child’s medical equipment) into a motel. For the first third of the film, it’s virtually impossible not to sympathize with her situation. Everyone’s on her case: Her husband’s patronizing tone on the phone is unhelpful, then there’s the judgmental doctor (played by writer/director Bronstein) who is demanding that Linda attend family therapy with her daughter, and frankly her daughter is something of a demon child with a unreasonable demand for a pet guinea pig, not the wisest investment at the present moment.
Then we kind of dig in with Linda a bit and realize she’s maybe not such an empathetic character when viewed from the outside. She’s numbing with drugs and alcohol; she isn’t sleeping, she’s leaving her child alone for long periods of time at night, sometimes hanging out with fellow motel resident James (A$AP Rocky). After a visit to her therapist (a perfectly exhausted Conan O’Brien), we discover that she, too, is a therapist with some patients who could likely use a more reliable therapist, including Caroline (Danielle Macdonald), a new mother obsessed with stories about mothers murdering their own children.
This film taps into that most primal of parental mindsets, the one where you can hold several things to be true at once, such as “I love my child” and also “I might murder my child.” It sounds horrible and harsh, and there are likely people who will turn their nose up at that very notion, but those people are not parents. Writer/director Bronstein mines the depths of depravity within the mind of parents and amplifies it, usually to great (pitch-black) comedic effect.
Bronstein found the absolutely perfect leading lady in Rose Byrne. Just, wow. I’ve liked Byrne as an actress since “Bridesmaids,” and I absolutely would have nominated her for Best Supporting Actress in 2015 for “Spy,” but this is one of those moments where you just think, “wow, I didn’t know you had this in you.” That may sound like a backhanded compliment, but I promise it’s just my own failure to recognize earlier her capacity for such a brilliant performance.
If the film wasn’t shot in sequence, Byrne’s performance is even more impressive because you can clearly track her physical and mental deterioration throughout the film. Seriously, not since Essie Davis in “The Babadook” have I gone from thinking, “That poor woman, having to deal with this petulant child”, to “someone needs to save that poor child from this insane woman.” Byrne is an absolute whirlwind of brilliance, always selling the reality of the increasingly unreal situations in which she places herself.
The film treats the reveal of the actor playing her husband as a surprise, so even though I recognized his voice over the phone, I won’t spoil his casting here, other than to say he’s better in this than he’s been in anything in a long time. The rest of the supporting cast is very good, but they are ultimately supporting Byrne, and they do so in exemplary fashion.
I would imagine the entire film will be divisive, and people will refuse to get on board for a film with such an off-putting character at the center. However, Bronstein and Byrne always manage to keep you siding with someone in the story, even if it’s not Linda, so there’s always something to engage you as Linda moves back and forth from protagonist to antagonist. People like me, however, who revel in characters that can, though, go dark, dark grey and retain at least a modicum of empathy, will find a lot to love here.
It’s a rollercoaster of a movie that constantly escalates the tension in a great way. It’s not accidental that I brought up “Marty Supreme” earlier, because Mary Bronstein is the wife of that film’s co-writer and longtime Josh Safdie collaborator Ronald Bronstein, both of whom are producers on this film. I don’t know if it’s just that feminine perspective on the same kind of adrenaline-fueled adventure that’s 4/5 rising action that appeals to me more, but I find this version of that same sort of thing to be much more effective.
I hope more people see this movie, but in particular, I hope more parents do. There is something so primeval in the way this film depicts that age-old parenting dichotomy I mentioned earlier. If you’ve got a healthy sense of humor and can handle seeing a parent go to some pretty dark places, you’ll come out the other side appreciating what it’s trying to do, if not outright loving what it is doing.
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