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“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” a severely stressful dark comedy crafted by the director and writer Mary Bronstein, marks the most recent and undeniably thorough exploration of a concept increasingly prevalent in U.S. cinema: the torturous nature of maternity, and the permission a mother should have to voice this sentiment without fear of rebuke. Marielle Heller’s “Nightbitch” (2024), adapted from Rachel Yoder’s book, presented a more fantastical iteration of the same notion: it depicted an artist so depleted and worn out by raising her young child that she morphed into a wild dog at night—a somewhat supernatural angle that, despite its ingenuity, seemed rather watered down when translated from page to screen. Director Maggie Gyllenhaal offered a sharper portrayal of maternal doubt in her 2021 adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s “The Lost Daughter,” which revolves around a middle-aged professor reflecting, during a seaside vacation, on her failings as, in her words, “an unnatural mother.”
Bronstein’s picture—her initial work since her début film, “Yeast” (2008)—features a similar statement. “I’m one of those individuals who shouldn’t be a parent,” a mother named Linda (Rose Byrne) expresses with sorrow. Her little girl (Delaney Quinn) suffers from a lasting gastrointestinal condition, and her husband, who is a sea captain, is on a vessel far away. Over a series of tense days, an already demanding circumstance is worsened by awful events. A massive gap manifests in the roof of Linda’s apartment, flooding the residence and compelling her and her daughter to move to a motel. Linda, employed as a therapist, must juggle her work commitments with the inevitably lengthy repairs, which are halted when a repairman experiences a family crisis. (Such emergencies are numerous in this film.) Linda also escorts her daughter to a health center for frequent treatments, none of which appear effective. There, she is repeatedly reprimanded, initially by an irritable parking lot attendant (Mark Stolzenberg), and subsequently by a physician (Bronstein), who cautions Linda about the ramifications if her daughter doesn’t soon achieve her ideal weight of fifty pounds.
Bronstein, whose every utterance overflows with wry, passive-aggression, was astute to portray herself as one of Linda’s many adversaries. It’s a darkly comedic, self-aware element, suggesting that she is both acknowledging and amplifying her own heavy-handed methods behind the camera, as she steers Linda toward extreme emotional states. Yet Linda is capable of managing these extremes, to a degree. Early on at the health center, her daughter, pinpointing the key contrast between her parents, portrays her father as firm, yet describes her mother as “stretchable”—an evaluation that Linda dismisses, visibly stung, though her subsequent actions reinforce it. The film’s balance lies in portraying this trait as both a merit and a drawback. Indeed, it is Linda’s adaptability that empowers her to laugh instead of weep over an almost-destroyed dinner, just as her considerable patience enables her to navigate a sequence of demanding patients at her workplace, known as the Center for Psychological Arts. (The actors Danielle Macdonald, Daniel Zolghadri, and Ella Beatty, among others, portray these patients.) Still, Linda’s flexibility can backfire, such as when she gives in to her daughter’s persistent pleas and purchases her a pet hamster—an unwise choice, with terrible yet thankfully transient consequences.
Byrne proves herself to be stretchable in the most favorable sense; her acting is a remarkable feat of tragicomic suppleness. Whatever she is doing at any given instant—rolling her eyes, languidly murmuring instructions into her device, dragging herself along a corridor in a daze, or expressing her vexation in a barely contained shout—she has the rare talent of appearing both emotionally exposed and physically enlivened by the constant observation of the camera. (Cinematographer Christopher Messina employed intense closeups for much of the movie.) In several of Byrne’s more noteworthy cinematic roles—a wealthy, indulged queen bee in “Bridesmaids” (2011), an imposing Bulgarian arms dealer in “Spy” (2015)—she embodied a natural comedic antagonist, a complacent, exceedingly capable rival to a floundering, awkward heroine. “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” brilliantly inverts that script; here, Linda is the one who is awkward, or so everyone around her appears to believe.
Similar to “The Lost Daughter,” a shore beckons strongly. “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” is staged in Montauk, and the ocean seems to exert an almost magnetic impact on Linda’s mind, as if the sea’s powerful undercurrents align with her own. Like “Nightbitch,” Bronstein’s picture also incorporates nocturnal horror elements: Linda doesn’t morph into a canine, yet as she walks around the area after dark her inner demons feel entirely unrestricted. The divisions between night and day are so pronounced that, at times, her escapades take on a nearly vampiric quality: when the sun is out, she seems depleted, restricted, and practically immobilized by her routine. After dark, at least, while her child is sleeping, she can slip out for a glass of wine, a drag of marijuana, or something more potent. She tries to acquire the latter with assistance from a motel manager, James, with whom she establishes a delightfully eccentric, often argumentative camaraderie. (James is played by the rap artist A$AP Rocky, delivering his second strong performance of the year, following Spike Lee’s “Highest 2 Lowest.”) These are brief indulgences, yet for Linda, they serve as a crucial reprieve. They enable her to convince herself, if only briefly, that she retains some semblance of her own identity.
When “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” made its first appearance, earlier this year, at the Sundance and Berlin International Film Festivals, its relentless, panic-attack style provoked critics to compare it to the work of Josh and Benny Safdie, whose films, such as “Daddy Longlegs” (2009), “Good Time” (2017), and notably “Uncut Gems” (2019), made for similarly stressful viewing experiences. The comparisons made sense; Bronstein is married to filmmaker, editor, and actor Ronald Bronstein, who has contributed to the Safdies’ films in various roles and served as one of the producers of “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.” While it might be unwise to presume a web of familial influence from the Safdies, it’s challenging to ignore here, especially given the film’s particular sensitivity to the subtleties of marital interaction.
From moment to moment, “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” can feel so overtly aggressive, bordering on offensive, that it requires a moment to recognize that it also employs strategic omissions and planned absences. Linda’s daughter is never addressed by name, and she is frequently heard but rarely visible. In Bronstein’s boldest formal maneuver, the child’s face is meticulously concealed, except for a single shot. Instead, the girl is reduced to various parts of her body: a pair of legs swinging from a toilet, or an abdomen from which a feeding device emerges—a visual that highlights her almost-umbilical reliance on Linda. During the night, the girl is diminished to a series of sounds: the bleeps and hums of a device to which she is attached while she rests, or the whimpers and snores emanating from the baby monitor that Linda carries during her lengthy nighttime walks. When she’s awake, though, Linda’s daughter is a voice, and a lively, spirited one, constantly laughing, talking, demanding, and complaining intensely. The concealment of the daughter’s face serves as a stark but effective representation of a main idea: how those we hold dearest can drain us to the point where we cease to truly perceive them as individuals.
The other conspicuously absent figure is Linda’s husband, Charles, who is acted by Christian Slater but, for much of the film, is merely a voice at the far end of a telephone line, shouting irritably and defensively into Linda’s ear. Charles is hardly the sole self-declared male provider to express a privileged indifference toward his wife and offspring. When a patient, a new mother grappling with postpartum depression, takes an impulsive, desperate action, Linda is forced to deal with her own physically and emotionally detached spouse. It is among the most irritating exchanges in the screenplay, and in such instances the narrative’s acute subjectivity of perspective abruptly feels remarkably perceptive and illustrative of a broader social pattern: an abundance of authoritarian male voices, and a scarcity of caring male faces or helpful male bodies attached to those voices.
There are exceptions, of a sort. James is one of them, though his considerate efforts to support Linda, as a novice handyman and reluctant babysitter, tend to backfire, generally impacting himself. At her place of work, Linda pursues guidance from a grumpy colleague down the hall, portrayed in his début acting role by a superbly deadpan Conan O’Brien. While not an especially sympathetic listener (another sly joke, considering O’Brien’s standing as a late-night interviewer), he still teaches Linda something of value regarding the meticulous upholding of boundaries—something she clearly struggles with—and the significance of taking action as opposed to lingering in uncertainty. “Make a selection,” he advises a challenging client at one moment. The counsel isn’t aimed at Linda, yet she evidently absorbs it, especially when the time arrives to pursue critical measures toward restoring her and her daughter’s lives.
In movies, an opening in a ceiling is typically a negative signal—something that provokes feelings of dread, whether in a horror production such as “Dark Water” (2002) or a sinister dark comedy such as “A Different Man” (2024). “The Hole” (1998), directed by Tsai Ming-liang, offered a more playful take on this concept, viewing an architectural flaw as an entry to romantic prospects. Bronstein imbues the device with her own Lynchian shivers of fear, on occasion directing the camera up into the ceiling, as if it were a gateway into the deepest parts of Linda’s mind. Ultimately, however, she explores those regions with a genuinely restorative intention. By presenting Linda with a pair of exposed injuries—one in the roof, and one in her daughter’s body—the film implies, with shrewd humor and energetic optimism, that the solutions to both problems might be one and the same. In “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” maternity isn’t merely a torment but a pit of suffering—suggesting that even it can be sealed off for good. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
