Mary Bronstein’s Latest is All Anxiety, No Impact: If I Had Legs I'd Kick You Film Review

Rose Byrne in If I Had Legs I'd Kick You.

Twisting my insides up is Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, and not even the celebrity cast members can soothe my anxiety. If I Had Legs I'd Kick You follows Linda (Rose Byrne) who is in the midst of a parental crisis. Her daughter has a condition shrouded in ambiguity. A tube in her daughter’s belly is mentioned over and over, while the camera looks so very close at Linda’s face. The lighting is all slightly too bright, and sound slightly too loud, adding up to a whole runtime of sandpaper texture scratching at you. That being said, the film’s thematic content left me wanting.

Linda and her daughter come home from a fruitless appointment with their doctor, who says Linda must do the work to care for her daughter, that her daughter isn’t healthy yet — what a pain in the neck! (actually, in the belly, I guess). After inhaling amputated cheese from a pizza, Linda is alerted to a flood of water at her daughter's feet. She follows the stream to her bedroom, where a gaping hole bursts in her ceiling, water spewing down into her home. The camera floats into the hole, a seeming mix of flesh and drywall, and we hear the echoes of a memory.

Due to the hole, Linda and her daughter move to a motel while repairs are made. She meets a friendly neighbourhood A$AP Rocky, and they try to buy drugs off the internet. She therapises miserable moms and wannabe lovers, and sputters her woes to Conan O’Brien, a fellow psychotherapist who she has developed a crush on. The film goes piano wire tense when one of Linda’s patients, a fellow reluctant mother, goes to use the washroom, leaving Linda with the infant child, and doesn’t return. Linda has to call the patient’s frustrat(ed/ing) husband and turn away her next patient. We follow the mystery of where this mom ran off to, and she reappears only to send a cryptic email of a woman who murdered her child. Linda and this disappeared mother both yearn to escape the resentment and pressure of motherhood, run off across a beach into the dark.

At the movie’s heart is Linda’s inability to repair. She fails to repair the hole in her ceiling, the hole in her daughter’s stomach, the hole in her identity. Linda feeds her daughter a diet of nutrient goo, via bag hump, pumped into her daughter’s tummy. She gives disinterested advice to her patients, and reassures her husband (Christian Slater) that the hole in the ceiling’s being patched — while sitting and drinking, trying to pretend she’s got it handled.

There’s a plethora of films about the trials of parenting, but David Lynch’s Eraserhead stands out to me. Lynch, with his allergy to the alphabet and explication, creates a world which reflects Henry’s psychological and emotional world — we get a similar move in If I Had Legs. The issue being that Mary Bronstein ties too fine a bow on her character’s neuroses. What emerges from comparing the two films is a completely different engagement with children. Where Linda never sees her daughter, the camera literally never looking at her until the film’s final moments, Henry and the audience know what his child looks like—no one forgets what the Eraserhead baby looks like. Yet through visibility, Lynch creates a wordless experience of catatonic confusion; you leave the film, like many horrific times in life, wondering what the hell just happened to you, even when you were there the whole time. Here, If I Had Legs is too ready to root Linda’s issues in a specific moment, a hole from which spews all her anguish. It isn’t like we get a full account of her mental state, but we do get several impassioned monologues, a type of testimony that summarizes Linda’s problems like reading a case study. The movie presents itself as a puzzle, but by the end leaves you feeling like you already knew the answer.

REVERIE caught an early screening of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You at the Calgary International Film Festival in September. If I Had Legs I'd Kick You will have a wide release across Canada beginning on October 17, 2025.