If I Had Legs I’d Kick You Review: Mother Meltdown

Linda is the center of her own world. Of course, everyone is, that’s just being human, but in Linda’s case that’s all there really is. The antagonist of hyperventilating psychodrama If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, the camera is thrust in, pore-close, on her furious furrowed brow and constant consternation that she must deal with other people.

Director Mary Bronstein (Yeast) is merciless in how she positions the camera on Rose Byrne as a therapist who seemingly can’t take any of her own advice. However, Byrne is equally merciless in her depiction of Linda, who seems to regard people in her life as either a burden or not supportive enough. She barks at everyone – her patients, teachers, even her long-suffering therapist/practice partner (Conan O’Brien). The two people who should be closest to her are reduced to mere voices: Her husband (Christian Slater) is just the other end of occasional phone conversations as he’s off captaining a cruise ship, while her daughter (Delaney Quinn) is present but out of sight. Linda can’t even look at her or give any real comfort, instead simply seethes that her elementary-school-age daughter refuses to wean herself off a feeding tube.

If Joachim Trier hadn’t stolen the title first, Bronstein could readily have called this The Worst Person in the World. Seriously, what kind of mother is mad at her kid for being sick? The script, and Byrne’s suitably breathless, solipsistic reading of it, give the audience every reason to not simply dislike Linda but despise her. She’s the dreaded Karen stereotype amplified to gigantic scale, but this is not a comedy about (or at the expense of) perimenopausal women.

Bronstein’s real target is the audience and the limits to its empathy. The idea of a mother who cannot even look at her own sick child is intended to disgust us. Equally, when Linda and her daughter are forced out of their home and into a motel by a bizarre water leak, she’s consistently rude and abrasive to the staff, most especially the constantly helpful James (A$AP Rocky). Drunk, high, angry – there’s not much to like in her behavior. However, just as we’re never actually told her daughter’s medical history, we don’t really know how Linda got here. The audience must psychoanalyze the psychoanalyst and find some compassion for her. If you were her, dealing with that whining kid, her AWOL husband, contractors who won’t return a damn phone call, would you be doing much better? Or are we like O’Brien – in a brilliantly against-type turn as the guy whose door she constantly kicks down, demanding support – telling her to get out?

By keeping the lens claustrophobically close to Byrne, the camera doesn’t so much occasionally pull back as let the audience briefly come up for air. If anything, cinematographer Christopher Messina emotionally brutalizes the viewer. Seemingly applying lessons he learned working camera for Bronstein’s old friends the Safdie Brothers on the equally feverish Good Time, between this and his work on the upcoming gun violence satire Our Hero, Balthazar he’s perfecting the art of getting insight into complex antiheroes.

And Byrne gives him exactly that. The intrusive POV doesn’t give her any room for slipups, and so all she gives it is perfect, frazzled, furious virtuosity. Even when she has alienated or even physically harmed half the people around her, and chronically failed as a shrink, Byrne and Bronstein still find more than enough humanity in her to make it hard for the viewer to condemn her. Audience, heal thyself.

This article appears in October 17 • 2025.