If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (USA, 2025)
Original title: If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Director: Mary Bronstein
Screenplay: Mary Bronstein
Main cast: Rose Byrne, Conan O’Brien, Danielle Macdonald, Delaney Quinn, Mary Bronstein, A$AP Rocky and Christian Slater
Running time: 113 minutes
There are some subjects that will never stop being made into movies, and motherhood is definitely one of them. Whether speaking in a more optimistic way, taking it to horror or simply creating a two-hour anxiety attack, as is the case in this film, how humanity will continue to reproduce will always leave room for some other type of approach to the subject.
What Mary Bronstein does is to elevate everything to the ultimate power, to put something radical in all spheres of the main character’s life, and to sadistically observe this woman deal with everything. So we have Linda (Rose Byrne), the mother of a girl with a mysterious illness that we know little about, but that we understand requires very intense care. As if the difficulties with her daughter weren’t enough, she also works as a therapist, has a husband who’s somewhat absent due to work, abuses her relationship with alcohol and, suddenly: a gigantic hole forms in the ceiling of her house and she has to move to a new place.
Although there’s an almost surreal element to this narrative, the plot doesn’t dare to stray too far from a more realistic scenario. Aside from the scenes involving this mysterious hole, it’s precisely the proximity to the life of a real mother that makes anyone despair along with the woman. There’s also an element of gore that’s always lurking, whether in an accident filmed in a very graphic way or when, at the height of dissatisfaction, we see an entire tube coming out of the child’s intestine.
All of this is filmed with a camera very close to Linda, both causing us to feel uneasy because (1) we do not know the condition of her daughter, and (2) it shows us the suffering from a leading role perspective. Rose Byrne gets the role of her career, having a gigantic range of emotions to demonstrate with the narrative and managing to bring each one of them in a convincing and equally desperate way.
With each new scene, whether it’s a conflict with one of her patients, with her own therapist, with her husband, with the receptionist of the hotel where she ends up staying, plate upon plate is added for this woman to keep spinning. All of this still happens under the incessant beeping of her daughter’s catheter, while she still tries to make the girl gain weight to reduce the support necessary for her life.
Unnervingly, the film is also not completely oblivious to the mother’s own flaws. The lack of looking at her daughter beyond the disease, the difficulty in dealing with her own internal conflicts and her lack of openness to asking for help are also present in the film. We are always on the edge between understanding this woman as someone who desperately needs help, or a narcissist who cannot give up some things to try to reorganize her life. And, among all these feelings, we’re left with the maternal fury that, when giving birth, one is ultimately always alone in the world. And worse than that, alone and being judged by everyone around her.
Considering how much success Byrne’s performance could still have throughout the awards and how relevant this subject is for a generation that often discusses the weight of “structural machismo” (a term and oppressive system which has been discussed in Brazil for a while now, but for which there’s no translation to English that I could find, even though the name itself is quite self explanatory), it’s strange that it was inserted so early in the awards season. Still, its relevance and chilling technical ability will certainly ensure that the work still has a brilliant career ahead of it.
