‘If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’ Review: Rose Byrne is Mother in Manic Maternal Gut Punch [A-] – Sundance Film Festival

No, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is not an amputee’s revenge fantasy. The Sundance Film Festival world premiere from Mary Bronstein (Yeast) is an immersive story of a woman truly on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The fact that the film counts Josh Safdie as one of its seven producers naturally will draw some comparisons with the mania of Uncut Gems. Its protagonist’s rapid spiraling is a wild ride, but it’s totally different to experience this from a woman’s perspective. The Sundance debut instantly establishes the film as the one to watch for. 

Rose Byrne gives a mesmerizing performance as Linda, a psychotherapist in Montauk, N.Y., who stresses over her daughter’s (Delaney Quinn) eating disorder and the lack of support from her absentee husband, Charles (Christian Slater), a captain who is at sea. In therapy, the daughter describes mom’s personality as putty that can be stretched, a characterization Linda defensively dismisses.  

The kid is an insufferably picky eater who doesn’t want cheese on a plain pizza and complains generally about sauce. Because of this, every night a feeding tube planted in her tummy must be connected to a pump. She receives daily treatment at a hospital, where Dr. Spring (Bronstein) constantly nags Linda about her avoidance of meeting and discussing the daughter’s lack of progress. 

To make matters even worse, the family’s home is suddenly flooded, followed by a huge chunk of the ceiling falling and leaving a gaping hole. Linda and her daughter temporarily stay in a hotel as they wait for repairs to be taken care of, but their landlord has been unresponsive, supposedly grieving over his mother. Conan O’Brien and A$AP Rocky tap in briefly, truly inspired casting choices, as Linda’s own therapist and hotel neighbor, respectively.

Of all the patients at her practice, Linda seems most invested in Caroline (Danielle Macdonald), a paranoid new mother who can’t bear leaving her newborn with a sitter and insists on taking him to each appointment. Despite constantly feeling the urge to shield her baby from imagined threats, Caroline one day inexplicably leaves the infant behind in Linda’s office and vanishes. The perceived failure to help Caroline only compounds Linda’s own feelings of inadequacies as a mother.  

Bronstein juxtaposes the two women’s shared anxieties and apprehension toward motherhood very deftly. Caroline has obvious mental issues – she abuses Linda’s emergency-only private number and confesses to stalking her. Following her disappearance, she even sends Linda an Andrea Yates video to explain her motive. By comparison, Linda is the sane one. But Caroline triggers something in her that she fears to confront. 

The film doesn’t seem to question Linda’s sanity. Or does it? The audience is privy to her headspace through the duration, so we’re with her even when she starts behaving badly, like leaving her sleeping child unattended in the hotel room to fetch a bottle of wine from the front desk or go back home to smoke pot. And we can’t forget when she goes full Karen on the hospital’s parking attendant (Mark Stolzenberg). She is so relatable that her acting out seems perfectly reasonable given the circumstances. 

If you scrutinize the stylistic choices, though, it’s as if Bronstein has been questioning Linda’s sanity all along. The sound design by Ruy Garcia amps up the nondiegetic ambient sounds, auditorily creating the atmosphere of a horror film. Linda also experiences visions when gazing through the hole in her ceiling. There are protracted montages of delirious hallucinations with layered screams and tantrums from Quinn. Perhaps Linda is crazy. Or perhaps everybody is on the mental illness spectrum. 

It’s all very intense and nerve-racking, so much so that it prompted a few walkouts during the premiere. But it’s also hilarious: a subplot involving the daughter relentlessly begging for a hamster, then changing her mind when the hamster bites. We see the hamster get run over by a car, and the film cuts to a microwave dinner that looks like the hamster’s carcass – an unexpectedly macabre payoff of a running joke. 

Byrne absolutely carries the film, masterfully rendering a wide range of emotions from simmering under the lid to boiling over with amazing facial detail. The costume and make-up teams are also on point with every stage of Linda’s descent. Bolstered by the cast and the craftsmanship of the crew, Bronstein has delivered a stunning portrait that may leave you questioning the blurred line between sanity and insanity. Although 2025 has just started, I get a sense that If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a film we’ll still be talking about at year’s end. 

Grade: A-

This review is from the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. A24 will release If I Had Legs I’d Kick You in the U.S. theatrically.

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Martin Tsai

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