If I Had Legs I’d Kick You Won’t Let You Look Away
Rose Byrne gives an all-time great performance as a woman on the edge of a breakdown.
No one is having a worse few days, nay weeks, than Linda (Rose Byrne). Her ailing daughter (Delaney Quinn) is not eating enough to meet the ideal weight that will allow her to get the feeding tube removed from her stomach. Her husband is away on a two-month work trip, only popping in for nagging phone calls, berating her for missing group therapy sessions. Her own therapy clients only dump their inane problems on her. Oh, and there’s a hole in her ceiling.
It’s this series of mundane problems that start to snowball until Linda is about to reach her breaking point. And that’s where If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Mary Bronstein’s surreal and tense new psychological thriller, holds you in its iron grip, forcing you to feel every new stressor and inconvenience that Linda is experiencing, until you feel like you are about to explode. And through Rose Byrne’s thunderous performance as a woman on the edge of a breakdown, it brings you right to the cusp of that explosion.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, written and directed by Bronstein, joins a long line of psychological dramas about women, often mothers, on the verge of a breakdown. The pain of womanhood, and motherhood, for that matter, has provided us with so much rich cinematic text over the years that it’s easy to wonder what a film with such relatively low stakes could add to the subgenre. But, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You does a lot with its relatively slim story, and it all works thanks to the towering, and absolutely shattering, lead turn from Byrne.
Linda’s slow spiral begins when she and her daughter arrive home one day to find a giant hole in her bedroom ceiling, where water is gushing down in a typhoon of burst pipes. Forced to move into a shabby motel while her landlord fixes the ceiling, Linda’s already-loose grasp on her life starts to become even more tenuous: plagued by dreams of the rotting, expanding hole in her ceiling, she buys a bottle of wine every night from the annoyed motel clerk (Ivy Wolk) just to get out of her room and away from her sleeping daughter. On top of that, one of her clients (Danielle Macdonald) is proving to have a worrying case of postpartum depression, and starts to call her at all hours of the night. And on top of that, the motel superintendent, James (a disarmingly charming A$AP Rocky) is getting a little too friendly for Linda’s liking. And that damn hole still isn’t getting fixed.
But the reason it works is because Bronstein hangs the entirety of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You on Byrne’s eyes. Bronstein and cinematographer Christopher Messina’s camera is always trained on Byrne’s face, and her eyes, most of all, in all their baggy, wide-eyed, unblinking glory. If I Had Legs makes the most of its small scope by being as claustrophobic as possible, barely showing any of the other people in Linda’s life, least of all her daughter or husband, both of whom are constantly present, but totally unseen throughout the film. Rather, we hear her daughter’s voice, whose whines almost always pitch up to a scream as an increasingly exhausted Linda tries to constantly navigate her needs. We see how her daughter’s mysterious illness affects Linda’s life, as she begrudgingly fills up her feeding tube with a goopy yellow substance every night. And we feel it all with her as Linda’s already frayed nerves begin to unravel even further.
Linda and James survey the hole in her ceiling.
Byrne is nothing short of spectacular in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, her agonized expression constantly commanding the whole frame that Bronstein constantly gives her. It’s been nine months since If I Had Legs first premiered at Sundance, and no performance since then has topped the tour-de-force that Byrne delivers. Linda is a raw nerve of a human being, whose every new hurdle is like a fresh new cut in her bleeding skin, until she’s all screaming pain and agony. She lashes out and pushes away any support, even from her fellow therapist (a somewhat distractingly cast Conan O’Brien) or the concerned nurse at her daughter’s clinic. And Byrne’s tremendous performance is complemented by the increasingly surreal turns that Bronstein takes the film in, turning the hole that plagues Linda’s nightmares into a Cronenbergian monster, a living, breathing, rotten abyss that threatens to swallow Linda whole.
Watching If I Had Legs is more than just experiencing a woman’s very bad week. It’s more like being caught in the grips of someone else’s fever dream, or being unable to escape the comedown from a really bad high. It’s sweaty, it’s squishy, it’s repulsive, and most importantly, it won’t let you look away.
