Waiting until my last film of TIFF 2025 to watch If I Had Legs I’d Kick You may have been a mistake. I spent all week listening to Oscar talk, race reviews and warnings that I’d cry and feel extremely anxious and claustrophobic the entire time. The truth is, I didn’t feel anything I haven’t already felt as a wife, mother, and daughter. Feeling these things in real life is far more horrifying than anything you can show me on the screen. Writer and director Mary Bronstein very obviously knew this. For many, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a horror movie, or at least a painful drama, but for many, it’s just life.
Women are constantly told to calm down, to breathe, to relax. No one ever takes into consideration what happens when we do. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You puts a woman at her ultimate limits on full display. A working mother to a sick child when she is struggling to care for, while living in a motel because her house is under seemingly endless emergency renovations, and caring for patients that very clearly mimic her own experience, Rose Byrne shows us what it can mean when we don’t “put on your oxygen mask before you put on theirs.”
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You doesn’t just explore a bad day or week or month as a mother. Bronstein wanted to show us what happens when the weight of the world is on a woman’s shoulders. From here on out, there may be some spoilers, so be prepared. Many films cover women needing to take care of themselves, or women pushed to their breaking point. But often, they focus on fixing the woman, hoping for a happy ending. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You doesn’t focus on an ending to the torture or a solution. It focuses on survival, and sometimes that’s all we have.
“For many, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a horror movie, or at least a painful drama, but for many, it’s just life.”
The script is great in itself. It’s tense and suspenseful. Rose Byrne brings it to life in a way I have never seen her, and yes, her performance is absolutely Oscar-worthy. However, the way the film is shot and directed plays a massive role in telling this story, too. We can talk about the long hallway shots to create tension and feelings of helplessness. We can talk about the hole imagery and all the things it symbolizes. We can even talk about the extreme close-ups to create a real sense of claustrophobia. What I was really obsessed with was the nameless, faceless child.
Byrnes’ Linda no longer sees her child as a child. She’s a burden. A guilt that is often not talked about. Motherhood isn’t pretty, and we have to shut up about it. A painful moment in a fit of fury and despair, Linda says she “got rid of the wrong one”, wishing she hadn’t had the child she does now.
The choice to make this child a voice off-screen and fragments of body parts was to let us focus on Linda to see how black and white everything feels anymore. To see how she can’t see the good anymore, like her child’s face. For the majority of the film, her husband Charles is also faceless, and it isn’t until she is finally face-to-face with him that she has to look everything in the eye, so to speak. She is forced to confront everything, and it hits her like a wave.
“Rose Byrne brings it to life in a way I have never seen her, and yes, her performance is absolutely Oscar-worthy.”
Bronstein perfectly captures a woman being pulled in a thousand directions. The idea that while she spirals out, she just wants someone to guide her and quite literally wants to be told what to do is all too familiar. To have the burden off oneself for just a moment. To have the responsibility land in someone else for just a second. Byrnes’ performance is so raw and real, and as a mother, I bet much of it came from a very real, raw place.
Toward the end of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, elements start to border on body horror and thriller. I realized that the horror is not meant for us, the audience. It’s meant for Linda. She crashes out as she hits rock bottom, and it becomes hard to tell our reality from Linda’s reality. Wave after wave of anxiety, guilt, pain, misery and more hit her over and over and over again. Her soul and her being become so battered and bruised that she can no longer stand, until we finally see her child, and then it’s time to dust off and get back to it.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You if filled with symbolism, but the most important thing about the film, to me, is how it brings light to just how dark things can get. This was a story that needed to be told, and between Bronstein and Byrne, I wouldn’t have wanted to see it any other way. I think I would have preferred a more raw and real version, rather than the surreal. That being said, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is something I think everyone should watch at least once, especially if you have a loved one who is a mother or you are one yourself.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You takes the saying “I’m going to do it, I just need to cry about it first” to the most realistic version of the darkest place a woman could go. It’s dark and it’s effective.
