Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

Rose Byrne in Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025)

Already pegged at Film Comment as one of the best films to premiere at Sundance so far, Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is also one of a handful of films slated to travel from Park City to Berlin—but the only one that the Berlinale has selected for its main competition. The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney readily admits that he “will neither be the first nor the last to describe this as Nightbitch meets Uncut Gems, and the latter allusion is not entirely unrelated.”

Bronstein made her on-screen acting debut in Frownland (2007), the first and so far only feature directed by her future husband, Ronald Bronstein, who edited Mary’s directorial debut, Yeast (2008). Years ago at Not Coming to a Theater Near You, Rumsey Taylor found that the two films “are thematic cousins, brutal in their exploitation of unpleasant human characteristics and humorous only in an anxious sense—laughing is appropriate at times, if only because no other response seems adequate.”

Yeast stars Bronstein herself, Greta Gerwig, and Amy Judd as bickering friends, and smaller roles are filled by Josh and Benny Safdie and Sean Price Williams, the cinematographer who shot both Frownland and Yeast. Ronald Bronstein has carried on working with the Safdies—from Daddy Longlegs (2009) through Uncut Gems (2019) to the forthcoming films The Smashing Machine, directed by Benny, and Marty Supreme, directed by Josh, who—along with Ronald—is a producer on If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.

Rose Byrne stars as Linda, a Montauk therapist whose husband, the captain of an ocean liner, is time zones away, leaving her alone with their daughter, an unnamed girl with an unnamed illness that requires her to be fed through a tube. IndieWire’s David Ehrlich suggests that “Linda’s daughter might as well be a figment of her imagination; played by a high-pitched but endearingly resilient Delaney Quinn, the girl is reduced to a bare shoulder in need of a blanket or a wisp of hair in the rearview mirror of Linda’s car. People say the child looks just like her mom, but that only strengthens the hyper-subjective impression that Linda’s daughter isn’t a person in her own right so much as a human manifestation of her own anxiety.”

That anxiety is cranked tighter when an upstairs plumbing mishap leads to a gaping and growing hole in the ceiling over Linda’s downstairs living room. “Is that the most surreal part of Linda’s meltdown or is it the feral hamster, hell-bent on escaping from its pet store box?” asks David Rooney. “Or the squalling baby she finds herself stuck with after he’s abandoned by his fretful mother Caroline (a near-hysterical Danielle McDonald), one of Linda’s patients? Or the revelation of a corporeal opening strangely like the seeping hole in her apartment?”

Linda and her daughter escape to a beachside motel with an unkindly receptionist (Ivy Wold) but a kindlier superintendent (A$AP Rocky) who scores pick-me-ups for Linda off the dark web until he—like even her own therapist (Conan O’Brien)—begins to lose patience with her. The constant rat-a-tat-tat of crises “can be effectively suffocating yet at times overly exhausting,” finds the Guardian’s Benjamin Lee. “Unlike Nightbitch, which softly tapped at the idea that having a child itself is an unending nightmare before essentially wrapping things up with a group hug, here Bronstein pushes far harder, framing motherhood as a frequently joyless and, for some, entirely ill-fitting life choice.”

Whether If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’s “thesis is nihilistic or honest will be in the eye of each beholder,” suggests Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson. “What is inarguable about the film is Byrne’s breakneck performance, a symphony of both deadened senses and jangled nerves. Byrne is alert and stupefied at once, palpably conjuring the feeling of running fast on fumes . . . It’s a towering performance, a feat of intelligence and energy that tightly binds to all of Bronstein’s heady, propulsive style.”

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