If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (1 1/2 stars out of 4)
Years ago I came across a video called, “How to Irritate People.” It was a collection of comedy sketches penned and performed by John Cleese, so coming from the man behind Monty Python and Fawlty Towers, I figured it was a sure thing. What I found was exactly what the cover advertised, only it was a little too effective. I didn’t make it through the whole tape, because the sketches were so accurate in capturing irritating people that they were insufferable to watch.
I thought about the Cleese video while trying to wrap my head around Mary Bronstein’s “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” a film that’s chief objective seems to be making its audience as miserable as humanly possible. The movie follows the tortured, surreal experience of a beleaguered mother as she navigates a minefield of impossible circumstances, mostly connected to a young child with a complicated and dangerous disease.
Linda (Rose Byrne) is a career woman and a mother whose world is literally crashing in on her. She’s trying her best to care for her sickly daughter (Delaney Quinn) while her husband Charles (Christian Slater) is halfway across the planet in the middle of an eight-week overseas assignment. But a challenging situation becomes substantially worse when a burst pipe in an upstairs apartment forces Linda and her daughter into a run-down motel while they wait on a landlord who seems indifferent to making repairs.
This circumstance leaves Linda in an almost fixed state of existence as she battles everyone from therapists to hotel night managers to parking attendants in a claustrophobic effort to get through each day. In theory, the hole in the ceiling will be repaired and she and her daughter can move home. In theory, her husband will get back in town and help care for their child. But nothing really seems to happen, and the walls of Linda’s mind just close in more and more.
As a portrait of a miserable existence, “If I Had Legs” is remarkably effective, and Byrne deserves all kinds of credit for a masterful performance. The trouble is that Bronstein’s film doesn’t seem to have anything more to say than motherhood—and by extension, parenthood—can be tremendously difficult and unfair, and that often life doesn’t seem interested in giving you any breaks.
From the sound design to the insistence on medium-to-close shots, Bronstein seems determined to make the audience feel trapped along with Linda, and it is a thoroughly unpleasant experience. Bronstein also insists on hiding the kid’s face for most of the film, which combined with some atmospheric elements leaves you expecting jump scares, though somehow iMDB has this film listed as a “dark comedy.”
If there was a meaningful payoff at the end, it might justify dragging the audience through the depths, but none can be found. And certain stylistic elements like surreal scene breaks and the decision to make every character an exaggerated insufferable caricature make it impossible to take the film too seriously.
In the most 2025 move of 2025, Linda leaves a visit with her therapist only to walk down the hall and enter her own office, revealing that she too is a therapist…and judging by her interactions with her own clients, not a good one. It’s easy to sympathize with Linda’s predicament, but she has a way of counterbalancing her deserved sympathy with some extremely unlikable qualities.
Altogether, “If I Had Legs” feels like a masterful exercise in atmosphere that doesn’t understand how to finish a proper story. Is parenting hard? Yes. Are people awful? Sometimes, yes. After almost two hours of misery, do I have any idea what, “If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You” means? No, but if I had a time machine, I’d love to get my two hours back. Real life is miserable enough on its own.
“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” is rated R for scattered profanity, some violence, and a suffocating nihilistic atmosphere that will make you question your life choices.