If I Had Legs I'd Kick You (2025)
Everybody needs something. Linda has nothing left to give.
Written and directed by Mary Bronstein · 113 minutes · United States
Starring: Rose Byrne · Conan O'Brien · Danielle Macdonald · Christian Slater · A$AP Rocky · Delaney Quinn · Ivy Wolk
Cinematography: Christopher Messina · Editing: Lucian Johnston · Sound design: Filipe Messeder
Owner's take: “I loved this film.”
There is a hole in Linda's ceiling. There is also a sick child, an absent husband, a job that consists of absorbing other people's pain, and the creeping suspicion that everyone asking whether she's coping would rather not hear the honest answer.
Mary Bronstein turns that into something ferocious, funny and genuinely frightening. If I Had Legs I'd Kick You understands exactly how one more reasonable request becomes unbearable when it lands on top of a thousand others nobody offered to share. Linda needs help. What she keeps getting instead is another conversation about what she needs to do.
Rose Byrne makes that distinction hurt. Her Linda is defensive, selfish, startlingly funny and dangerously overwhelmed — frequently all at once. The film stays close enough to catch every flicker of it, including the moments when understanding her starts to feel like a chore. That is a large part of the achievement.
Before you watch
- Severe psychological distress: sustained panic, disturbing subjective imagery and increasingly dangerous behaviour are central to the film.
- Child illness and neglect: a child's feeding disorder, medical equipment and unsafe caregiving are depicted. Specific medical actions are discussed below the spoiler boundary.
- Suicide attempt: a sustained attempt is depicted; its circumstances belong to the ending discussion.
- Animal death and injury: an animal's death and a bloody human injury appear onscreen.
There is also frequent strong language, drinking and cannabis use. These advisories are corroborated by BBFC guidance.
The reference length is 113 minutes. A24 released it in the US in October 2025, after its Sundance premiere; the BBFC's later 2026 listings do not change its 2025 catalog identity. A24's film page confirms the writer-director and runtime.
A caregiver who cannot get care
Linda is a psychotherapist whose daughter needs a feeding tube and a hospital day programme. Her husband, Charles, works away from home. When the apartment floods after a ceiling collapse, Linda and her daughter move into a motel — a temporary solution that generates a fresh stack of things to manage.
The setup is already serious. Then the film makes ordinary errands feel capable of breaking the person running them. An appointment, a repair, a request at the front desk: each one demands a composure Linda is running out of.
Her profession is the sharp part. She is supposed to make room for feelings, sit with uncertainty, respond constructively. At home, the demand just keeps coming. Somewhere in that arrangement, her own need for care has become an embarrassing loose end.
The screenplay never lets clinical knowledge double as armour. Knowing how distress works is no guarantee you'll recognise your own, or that somebody will finally step in the moment you do.
Which is exactly what makes the sessions with her own therapist — Conan O'Brien — so painful. Linda wants something she can use. What she gets can feel like yet another surface to smack into. Their professional closeness, and their increasingly hostile encounters, wreck any tidy split between the competent helper and the person in need.
Rose Byrne's face becomes the main location
Bronstein and Messina keep bringing us close to Byrne's face. It's claustrophobic even in rooms that are perfectly ordinary. We get to study Linda's reactions while staying shut out of the situation producing them. She can't get distance from her life; the camera won't let us have any either.
Byrne is extraordinary at the attempted recovery of control. A reply lands a half-beat too sharp. An explanation curdles into a defence. Irritation briefly replaces fear — because irritation is at least something she can act on. The fear is still there underneath.
That restlessness is the performance's engine. This is not two hours of the same exhausted face. Linda keeps auditioning new ways to survive the next encounter, and Byrne lets you see the effort before it collapses into another failure.
There is a whole person under the emergency. Bronstein has described prepping with Byrne by imagining Linda before motherhood and before the crisis, letting traces of that earlier life survive in her clothes and behaviour. That history gives her anger an extra charge: she is frightened of vanishing into the labour of keeping someone else alive. Steve Prokopy's interview with Bronstein digs into that collaboration.
The distinction matters, because without it Linda could flatten into a case study in caregiver burnout. Byrne hands her the inconvenient specificity of a person. Sympathising with the pressure on her does not require signing off on every choice she makes.
The person outside the frame
For most of the film, Linda's daughter reaches us through a voice, fragments of a body, and the logistics of her treatment. Bronstein withholds the usual exchange of looks between parent and child, and keeps dragging us back to the adult who has to respond.
It is a slyly cruel strategy. A child's needs can fill an entire room while the child, as a separate human being, slips out of an overwhelmed parent's view. The framing makes that narrowing of perception something you can feel.
It also makes our seat uncomfortable. We are parked with someone whose feelings are understandable and whose view is becoming dangerously narrowed. The camera's allegiance is a formal choice — not a promise that Linda's version of events adds up to the whole truth about the people around her.
Bronstein has been explicit that the withholding is meant to keep us with Linda rather than instantly handing all our sympathy to the child. That explanation, in the Third Coast Review interview, clarifies the intention without dissolving the ethical tension. The film wants us to feel what this mother is going through while still holding us responsible for noticing who she can no longer properly see.
The soundtrack will not leave you alone
Medical machinery, voices, intrusive environmental noise — the demands on Linda are made physically present. Sound reaches her even when its source is offscreen. Walking out of a conversation doesn't buy reliable quiet.
There is no conventional composed score. Bronstein credits Messeder and re-recording mixer Ruy Garcia with building a soundscape that does most of the expressive heavy lifting. Her Brooklyn Magazine interview makes clear the heightened style is a decision, not an accident. This is an aggressively subjective construction, not a neutral record of an ordinary week.
That choice allows a productive slippage between a sound in the room and the weight it takes on inside Linda's head. A machine can be necessary for her daughter's care and still be unbearable to listen to. The film lets both truths share the air.
In the printed excerpt accompanying Dolby's conversation with Bronstein and Messeder, Bronstein describes sound as a way of forcing Linda's internal experience onto the viewer's body. It works, unnervingly well: the soundtrack can have you craving relief before you've formed any opinion about the woman asking for it.
The hole is allowed to be a hole
The wrecked apartment is a gloriously unsubtle image. Something meant to shelter Linda has opened up. Repair gets promised, deferred, then harder and harder to picture.
Bronstein pushes it toward horror. Staring into the opening becomes an encounter with something bigger than a maintenance issue. The film can slide from an argument about practical arrangements into a strange, threatening vision without treating the shift as a separate genre detour.
No need to reduce every image to a line on a symbolism worksheet. The hole can mean unprocessed fear, an invitation to disappear, a wound, or just an ordinary catastrophe nobody will fix. Those readings pile up because the film keeps walking us back to a physical place.
The real relationship is between the practical and the impossible. Linda needs the ceiling patched. She also needs something far harder to name. And when the space turns uncanny, the first need hasn't gone anywhere.
Funny enough to make the next moment worse
O'Brien's casting arrives loaded with the expectation that he'll deflate the tension with a joke. His guarded, irritated performance turns that expectation into fuel: a man famous for making audiences comfortable becomes someone who flatly refuses to give Linda the response she wants.
A$AP Rocky, as motel superintendent James, offers a different kind of attention. His ease briefly cracks open the possibility of a relationship in which Linda is a person to hang out with rather than a role failing to meet its obligations. That possibility has limits — including the limits of Linda's ability to give anything back.
Ivy Wolk's motel clerk delivers a wonderfully maddening institutional indifference. The person across the desk is entitled to a terrible day without that making yours any less terrible. The humour lives in the incompatible urgency of those two positions.
Danielle Macdonald's Caroline, one of Linda's patients, makes the professional stakes impossible to contain. Here is another struggling mother who needs more than Linda can safely give. Their scenes stop the film from treating Linda's distress as the only distress in the building.
The comedy gives all these relationships their own temperature — and it builds little pressure valves that make the next demand hit harder. Laughing can be recognition, an ugly reflex, or a quick escape. Bronstein is happy to use all three.
Compassion without a certificate of innocence
The film's toughest move is refusing to make sympathy depend on spotless behaviour. Linda's circumstances are punishing. Her responses hurt people. You need both facts to understand the movie.
That tension stops the institutions around her from swallowing the whole explanation. The husband, the medical programme, the therapist, the motel — each becomes part of her experience of being trapped. But the film also shows the collateral damage when she tries to make someone else carry what she cannot.
The restricted viewpoint carries a risk: the supporting cast can start to look like obstacles arranged around one performance. Macdonald and Rocky are the antidote, because their characters keep needs and limits that Linda cannot simply explain away. The moments she fails them make the film's argument less comfortable and a lot more convincing.
This is demanding filmmaking, and its sustained pressure may be too much for someone hoping for a gentle drama about resilience. That audience distinction does not, by itself, establish a failure of craft. The framing, sound and abrupt comedy give the harshness a purpose and a form.
Corny DNA
The absurd title, the hostile encounters and the disturbing imagery generate real strangeness without turning suffering into camp. Byrne's performance and the abrasive sound are doing precision emotional work. There is no useful so-bad-it-is-good angle here.
Its staying power comes from total commitment to an uncomfortable point of view. Numerical Corny DNA scores stay unassigned.
Verdict
Worth watching — proposed editorial classification. The owner loved this film, and that enthusiasm belongs near the centre of the page. The exact classification and new advisory wording remain proposals.
Bronstein and Byrne make a formidable team. The performance, the restricted framing, the black comedy and the sound all press on the same crisis from different directions, while the film keeps stress-testing the gap between compassion and responsibility. It is an excellent film whose difficulty is precisely the point.
Spoilers from here
Reveal the medical decision, suicide attempt and final encounter
A repair that solves the wrong problem
Linda pulls out her daughter's feeding tube herself. The apparent sealing of the opening in the child's body belongs to the film's disturbing subjective imagery; it does not prove the medical problem has safely resolved.
The act drags Linda's wish for the crisis to end into dangerous territory. A visible piece of treatment has become, to her, an obstacle she can just remove. The film makes the desire completely legible while making the action alarming.
Charles returns and the ceiling gets fixed. A domestic problem can now look solved while the crisis that has eaten Linda stays exactly where it was. The contrast is brutal: patching a surface does not restore the person who spent the film staring into it.
Being returned to the shore
Linda runs into the sea in a sustained suicide attempt. The waves keep shoving her back. The sequence gives physical form to a wish to escape that won't simply play out on her terms.
Then the ending grants a view the film has withheld the whole time: her daughter's face beside her on the sand. Linda promises to be better. The change in framing matters as much as the promise — a child who has mostly reached us as need, voice and medical obligation is suddenly available as a separate person.
That is an opening toward recognition, not proof of recovery. The film has already taught us not to trust the idea that a damaged person can make everything safe just by promising to try harder. The daughter's illness, Linda's behaviour and the threadbare support around them don't evaporate because the final scene is tender.
The sequence is also filtered through the film's unstable subjective register. We can describe what it shows without claiming it settles Linda's future or certifies every earlier image as literal. Its emotional movement is clearer than its prognosis: for a moment, she can see her daughter again.
The people and animal caught in the crisis
James suffers a serious leg injury at the wrecked apartment. Linda calls for help and then abandons him there, turning a man who offered her attention into one more problem she can't face. Caroline's crisis likewise outruns the reassuring idea that caring is enough if you mean well.
The animal advisory concerns a hamster killed by a vehicle, with upsettingly visible detail. These events matter because the film gives Linda's overwhelmed behaviour consequences outside her own suffering — its empathy does not make those consequences harmless.
Sources
- A24: official film page, release information and runtime.
- Sundance Institute: premiere discussion with Bronstein, Byrne and O'Brien.
- A24 press notes hosted by the Berlinale: credits and character accounts.
- BBFC: release timings and detailed content guidance; contains spoilers.
- Third Coast Review: Steve Prokopy interviews Mary Bronstein about character, viewpoint and horror.
- Brooklyn Magazine: Abe Beame interviews Bronstein about heightened form, sound and the ending.
- Dolby Creator Talks: Bronstein and sound designer Filipe Messeder; printed introductory excerpt consulted.
- Berlinale: official 2025 awards, including Byrne's Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance.
This is a researched editorial draft incorporating the owner's stated enthusiasm. It does not claim a fresh viewing or approval of new numerical scores and advisories.