If parenting had an official motto, it will most likely be one thing alongside the traces of “It isn’t purported to be like this.” It isn’t purported to really feel such as you’re holding on by a thread for years at a time. It isn’t purported to really feel such as you’re liable for every little thing and able to nothing. Your accomplice isn’t purported to captain a ship someplace distant for a number of months on finish. Your daughter isn’t purported to be stricken with a mysterious sickness that stops her from consuming. Your apartment isn’t purported to flood on the finish of an extended day, the leak above the main bedroom out of the blue exploding right into a gap so large that it quickly comes to look like a portal into the center of oblivion itself.
A few of these issues are extra severe than others, however Linda — a Montauk psychotherapist who’s performed by a magnificently unraveling Rose Byrne — has misplaced no matter was left of her skill to tell apart between a minor inconvenience and an apocalyptic disaster. It isn’t supposed to be like that both. Then once more… how else might it’s? Life is probably the most chaotic power within the recognized universe, and it’s absurd that we’ve allowed the act of creating it to breed such a bunch of ultra-rigid expectations.
By the identical token, having youngsters is the awesomest duty on earth since you all the time really feel unworthy of it. The Talmud says that “whoever saves one life saves the world total,” but when that’s the case, it’s solely pure that whoever creates life would possibly really feel beholden to everybody they meet. And it’s solely pure that one of many rawest and most sincere motion pictures ever made about up to date motherhood needs to be surreal sufficient to conflate notion and actuality in a lot the identical means; that its harrowing-as-hell (however regularly hilarious) portrait of a well-heeled white woman making an attempt to outlive a brief inconvenience ought to cleave rather a lot nearer to the likes of “Uncut Gems” and “Eraserhead” than it does to, say, “Gilmore Ladies.”
Extra lifelike by advantage of its pronounced expressionism, Mary Bronstein’s “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” — her first function since “Yeast” in 2008, and a far cry from the mumblecore naturalism of her debut — is the sort of movie by which the issues that needs to be scary are humorous, and the issues that needs to be humorous are terrifying. The premise itself is each guardian’s worst nightmare, but it surely’s formed in a means that makes it really feel like a cosmic joke. Which is to say that Linda spends a lot of the film locked in a close-up so excessive that every little thing round her, her unnamed younger daughter most of all, looks as if a tauntingly disembodied echo of her personal anxieties.
The woman is affected by a wierd sickness of some type that requires her to be fed soylent goop by a feeding tube in her stomach, and Linda feels prefer it’s her fault that her child isn’t gaining sufficient weight to eat on her personal. The entire thing could be overwhelmingly unhappy if not for the truth that Linda’s daughter would possibly as nicely be a figment of her creativeness; performed by a high-pitched however endearingly resilient Delaney Quinn, the woman is lowered to a naked shoulder in want of a blanket or a wisp of hair within the rearview mirror of Linda’s automotive. Folks say the kid appears to be like identical to her mother, however that solely strengthens the hyper-subjective impression that Linda’s daughter isn’t an individual in her personal proper a lot as a human manifestation of her personal nervousness.
The gaping wound within the woman’s abdomen units the stage for a narrative compelled by the sinister and unnatural sight of a gap that refuses to shut by itself. The one which erupts from Linda’s ceiling — the primary jump-scare in a jittery movie that likes to maintain you in your toes — really appears to develop larger as the times go by, although it threatens to change into infinite from the very first time cinematographer Christopher Messina (“Good Time”) plunges his 35mm digital camera into the infinite darkness of the apartment’s drywall, the opening credit unfolding with the identical sort of alien surprise that one other title sequence as soon as discovered inside Howard Ratner’s asshole. (It’s a disgrace that critics like me have made “Uncut Gems” into such a hacky reference level for heart-in-your-throat cinema, as a result of “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” all however calls for the comparability, and never solely as a result of it was produced by Safdie brothers collaborator Ronald Bronstein.)
Bronstein’s script is simply too rapid and pressurized to supply any backstory, but it surely’s clear that the ceiling gap is the straw that breaks the camel’s again, and Linda begins to fray aside fairly quick after that. To some extent, that’s as a result of she’s merely simply reached her restrict, and each subsequent impediment or obligation — regardless of how small — appears like a full-blown assault, the best way {that a} widespread chilly is sufficient to kill somebody with a failing immune system system. Bronstein renders each scene with an equivalent degree of disaster, till it’s onerous to say in case you’re watching a sequence of discrete catastrophes or a single unbroken symphony of misery (an uncertainty maintained by the brain-sawing rhythms of the movie’s meticulous sound design, which type their very own rating of ambient misery because the beeps of the kid’s medical gadgets stalk Linda throughout city like a thought she will’t overlook.)
When Linda strikes her daughter right into a shoddy beachside motel, borderline purgatorial in the course of the Montauk low season, the woman on the entrance desk refuses to promote her a bottle of wine as a result of it’s too late at evening. That’s a bummer. When certainly one of Linda’s sufferers — a dangerously unwell new mother performed by “Patti Cake$” actress Danielle Macdonald — abandons her child in the course of a session, that’s worse. However to Linda, so manically incapable of mapping her private company within the face of a world that feels prefer it’s spitting at her for sport, every little thing is equal and all of it’s her fault. Every thing is simply surreal sufficient for all of it to really feel unnervingly lifelike. “Something may very well be actual,” somebody says. “Something may very well be bullshit, too.”
For Linda, even the nice issues are warped into horror reveals (the scene the place Linda buys her daughter a hamster is side-splittingly fucked up), and the individuals who she turns to for assist are so fed up along with her that they make her really feel past saving. That’s very true of her personal therapist, a lifeless fish of a person who likens Linda to a lab rat who retains gnawing its personal limbs off; Bronstein’s resolution to solid the function with a pathological extrovert like Conan O’Brien is a stroke of genius, as there’s a vertigo-like queasiness to watching the funniest man in America battle so onerous to smother each conceivable snort.
O’Brien’s efficiency can’t assist however mine a number of killer moments of droll hysteria from his character’s radiating distaste, but it surely nonetheless proves an ideal complement to the down-is-up claustrophobia of a film by which Linda’s nervousness solely makes her much less sympathetic at each flip. Simply ask James, the easygoing tremendous on the motel the place Linda’s staying. Performed by rapper A$AP Rocky in a efficiency that’s immediately likable, grounded, and one million different issues that Linda is just not, James is energized by his frantic new good friend and satisfied that it could be enjoyable to deliver an uptight mother out of her shell; intercourse doesn’t look like an possibility, however a minimum of they’ll store for medicine collectively on the darkish internet. Alas, friendship is a tenuous proposition for a lady so thinned by the maintenance of her existence that she will solely acknowledge different folks for the obligations they current. For Linda, even an olive department is asking an excessive amount of of her.
“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” vibrates with a primordial love and respect for its heroine, one which self-evidently stems from Bronstein’s personal experiences as a mom, however the movie refuses to wink at its viewers or usually even the slightest trace of memeable solidarity. There isn’t a second on this relentlessly subjective film the place Linda’s thoughts goes clean sufficient for Bronstein to allow us to backstage and say, “Everybody on display could be fed up with this strolling catastrophe of a lady, however I do know that you’d discover it in your coronary heart to see that she’s hurting.”
Byrne’s caustic and hyper-committed eye twitch of a efficiency by no means provides us that likelihood (few actors have ever been so humorous with out acknowledging the very fact of their very own jokes), and even when it did, there’s no proof to counsel we’d know methods to assist. I’m solely so outfitted to evaluate this movie as a 4DX-level simulation of maternal misery, however few issues have extra discomfitingly resonated with my expertise as a guardian — or extra vividly articulated the hapless stupidity of being a dad — than how Bronstein frames Linda’s absent husband within the context of her private descent into hell. She simply needs somebody to really feel like they’re liable for her, but it surely’s onerous for males to understand what meaning in a world that enables them to exist individually from their kids; to delegate the trivialities of their day-to-day care in a means that makes it simpler for them to maintain their eye on the large image of being a guardian, which is simply so fucking lovely with even a half-inch of perspective. Even the gap of a large shot would do.
“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” doesn’t paint in broad strokes or retreat into the self-satisfaction of pressured empowerment, but it surely spirals in the direction of the very backside of Linda’s soul with a terminal velocity that feels as incontrovertible and uncompromising because the legal guidelines of physics. They all the time say to place your personal oxygen masks on first, however what in case you are the emergency? And the way is anybody supposed to drag themselves out of such a extreme tailspin?
You possibly can really feel Bronstein scrambling for a solution to resolve this story in a means that doesn’t betray the honesty of its telling, and it’s doable that individuals would possibly discover one thing pat concerning the movie’s climactic act of self-obliteration. The film’s most heightened show of physique horror provides solution to its most constructed second of sweetness, an abrupt change in tone that hits you within the face with the energy of a wave crashing down on the shores of the Atlantic. However Linda isn’t on the lookout for a straightforward means out, and “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” doesn’t give her one.
In a film that’s haunted by the lyrics of Harry Nilsson’s “Assume About Your Troubles,” it could be sufficient for Linda simply to listen to them clearly. To keep in mind that every little thing finally bubbles again to the place it first started, and that every little thing on this earth needs to be swept out by the tides to ensure that the cycle to proceed — precisely the way it’s purported to.
Grade: A
“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” premiered on the 2025 Sundance Movie Pageant. A24 will launch it later this yr.
Need to keep updated on IndieWire’s movie opinions and demanding ideas? Subscribe right here to our newly launched e-newsletter, In Overview by David Ehrlich, by which our Chief Movie Critic and Head Evaluations Editor rounds up the very best new opinions and streaming picks together with some unique musings — all solely out there to subscribers.