With the rise of women filmmakers in recent years, we’ve seen more movies take on a taboo subject: messy motherhood. While Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love got more theatrical play last year, no one interested in daring cinema should miss writer-director’s Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, now streaming on HBO Max and YouTube Primetime. Rose Byrne won a Golden Globe Award and is up for an Oscar for her performance in the intense, borderline-surreal tragicomedy.
The deal
Linda (Byrne) never leaves crisis mode. Her husband, a ship’s captain, is away on an eight-week cruise. Her young daughter (Delaney Quinn) has a feeding disorder, a gastric tube, weight goals and a doctor (Bronstein) who scolds Linda for not staying on top of the situation.
Then the ceiling falls in — literally. After their apartment becomes a disaster zone, mother and daughter move into a seaside motel. Now Linda’s days and nights are a succession of petty arguments — on the phone with a recalcitrant contractor; in person with a clerk (Ivy Wolk) who seems determined not to sell her alcohol. When she seeks respite with her therapist (a wonderfully prickly Conan O’Brien), he begs her to stop emailing him about her dreams.
Did I mention that Linda is herself a therapist? With a deeply depressed patient (Danielle Macdonald) who is worried about harming her baby?
Will you like it?
When I was 7 or 8, my mother showed me a drawing in which she’d depicted my dad as a monk, my sister and me as screaming urchins, and herself as a serene Pollyanna managing it all. It was a little hyperbolic, maybe, but it was the truth of how she felt.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You has a lot in common with that drawing: Everything in it is self-consciously heightened, conveying feeling more than fact. But Bronstein doesn’t spare the long-suffering mom from her satirical lens. In fact, she keeps Linda’s daughter off-screen until the very last shot, so the focus stays firmly on her protagonist.
And Linda is not serene or nice. She doesn’t smile or moderate her tone. When we meet her, she’s already so far past the point of giving a shit about anyone’s expectations of femininity that she growls when the affable motel manager (A$AP Rocky) addresses her as “miss” or “ma’am.” When he calls her “crazy-pants,” she finally pays attention. He’s speaking her language now — the language of someone who leaves her sick daughter in a motel room every night so she can wander the grounds, smoke, drink, weep and try to piece back together the person she used to be.
Framed in unforgiving close-ups, Byrne incarnates Linda from first shot to last so convincingly that you may feel like you know her (or have been her). While too many actors portray a mental breakdown with grand, flailing gestures, Byrne instead puts us on the punishing wavelength of long-term stress, nailing the tone and posture of someone who’s always braced for the next calamity.
We may not approve of Linda’s coping methods, but we see why she feels like she’s drowning. Nearly every man she encounters shoves his responsibilities onto her or tries to control her in some way. Nearly every woman lectures her, turning well-intentioned bromides such as “It’s not your fault” into reproaches. No amount of love and patience has made Linda’s daughter well, and she’s run out of the latter and is clearly anxious about her supply of the former.
Bronstein has described If I Had Legs I’d Kick You as inspired both by her own experience of caring for an ill child and by David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Viewers might also be reminded of the merciless pace of Uncut Gems — its codirector, Josh Safdie, coproduced this film — and the depiction of an anxious person’s inner world in Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid.
The Lynchian influence is clearest whenever Linda confronts the hole in her ceiling, and it becomes a fleshy, pulsing void with its own light show and soundscape, sucking her in. Aside from the obvious womblike aspects, there’s an intriguing callback here to the imagery of Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist, whose emotional core is a selfless mother dragging her child back from the Beyond. Linda knows her job is to rescue her daughter, and she’s determined to try. But who will rescue her?
Linda is one of those larger-than-life fictional creations who captures the truths real people struggle to voice. When she wonders aloud if she was meant to be a mother, or promises to “do better” while patently knowing she can never be perfect, her despair resonates. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You isn’t an easy film to watch, but it’s gripping and cathartic and shockingly funny — a horror movie about all the ways motherhood is both necessary and impossible.
If you like this, try…
Die My Love (2025; MUBI, rentable): Jennifer Lawrence plays a writer suffering from postpartum depression in Ramsay’s visually stunning art-house drama.
Nightbitch (2024; Disney+, Hulu): Amy Adams is a stay-at-home mom whose frustrations give her fangs in Marielle Heller’s dramedy, the only one of these movies with an upbeat ending.
Saint Omer (2022; Disney+, Hulu, Kanopy, rentable): Less heralded than those two films, but well worth watching, is Alice Diop’s courtroom drama about a pregnant writer attending the trial of a young Senegalese immigrant charged with infanticide.
This article appears in February 11 • 2026.
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