Mother Stands for Comfort
By Matthew Eng
New York Film Festival 2025:
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Dir. Mary Bronstein, U.S., A24
The familiar face of Rose Byrne is transformed into uncharted terrain in the opening shot of Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. The filmmaker brings us close enough to Byrne that we can make out a faint vein under her left eye, a pockmark on her right cheek. The camera moves in and out on this face but never wavers from it as Byrne’s character, Linda, processes then pushes back against a characterization voiced by her unseen child, who describes her mom as “stretchable,” as in malleable or resilient.
Linda is by no means a stretchable woman and she knows it; to paraphrase Mariah Carey, when she breaks, she breaks. And by the time we meet Linda, she is fast approaching her breaking point. Her young daughter is suffering from an unspecified and malnourishing illness that requires round-the-clock attention and a feeding tube that funnels homemade goop directly into her stomach as she sleeps. Her husband, a boat captain of some sort, is in the middle of an eight-week voyage. Linda is only inwardly at sea, straining to balance the drudgery of her day job as a therapist to a variety of enervating patients with the cruel impositions of acting as sole caregiver to a sick child whose condition will not improve. There is also, as of late, a gaping hole in her bedroom ceiling.
A grotesque and grimly funny freak-out that unfolds with the hurtling momentum of a runaway train, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You marks the reemergence of its long dormant writer-director. Bronstein was a Tisch acting graduate with a single screen credit to her name when she wrote, directed, and starred in 2008’s Yeast, a stark, micro-budgeted mumblecore comedy about a Brooklyn teacher’s pugnacious and poisonous relationships with an aimless roommate and a manic frenemy, the latter diabolically played by Greta Gerwig. Today, Bronstein’s debut looks like the slovenly, wayward elder stepsister of Gerwig’s Frances Ha (2012); its presentation may be unrulier but its truths about growing up and out of formative friendships are harsher and altogether harder to swallow. (It also functions as a mid-aughts time capsule of various fledglings in New York’s independent film scene: the cinematographer Sean Price Williams, who shot Yeast on MiniDV, and Josh and Benny Safdie, frequent collaborators of Bronstein’s multihyphenate husband Ronald, all show up as assorted dickheads.) After the film premiered at South by Southwest, Bronstein worked on a short and acted on occasion, but she had not made another feature until this year. In the interim, Bronstein earned two master’s degrees, penned feminist cultural theory, and tended to her own daughter’s illness, the treatment of which necessitated relocating from New York to San Diego, where mother and child hunkered down in a hospital-subsidized motel room for eight months.
These experiences are obliquely channeled into If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, in which an aqueous eruption in Linda’s Montauk apartment forces mother and child to take a room in an eerie beachside motel. To say that Bronstein’s sophomore effort is a personal work perhaps risks understating the director’s connection to the material. The film is a deep plunge into its protagonist’s psyche—Bronstein has said that she “wanted to feel like the camera was behind Linda’s eyeballs”—and keeps hyper-focused on the character to the exclusion of those closest to her. Viewers will notice right away that Linda’s child lacks both a name and a face. The child has been secreted out of the frame even in dialogue scenes with Byrne, her physical bearing carefully evaded through blocking and framing so that she manifests only as a crown of hair, a pair of legs swinging from a toilet seat, or an ear eagerly listening to a Harry Nilsson lullaby. However, as played by Delaney Quinn, she is given a strident vocal presence, as is Linda’s absent husband Charles, who registers mainly as a badgering bleat on the other end of her iPhone. These choices at first read as gimmicks, but their execution is so absolute—and the voice performances so energetic—that they mesh quite neatly in the film’s elaborate tapestry, intensifying Bronstein’s portrait of Linda as a woman fundamentally alone.
Bronstein and Byrne developed the film during an extended rehearsal period, meeting on a weekly basis for months to expand the character and discuss every facet of the script. Borne of a true collaboration, Linda manifests as one of the more aberrant and astringent American women to appear on screen in recent times. Director and star are united in their refusal to soften their forcibly, failingly chipper protagonist or qualify her exceedingly questionable behavior; at one point, she berates her repairman over the phone, disregarding the news that his mother has died. By day, Linda avoids her daughter’s no-nonsense doctor (Bronstein) and rambles through daily check-ins with her reticent shrink and coworker (a perfectly phlegmatic Conan O’Brien) for whom she fruitlessly pines. Her own patients seem to either rankle or stupefy her, save for Caroline (Danielle Macdonald), a new parent suffering from postpartum psychosis who becomes something like the external embodiment of Linda’s most shameful maternal fears. At night, Linda leaves her sleeping daughter attached to a machine to guzzle a bottle of wine and smoke weed, rebuffing the advances of a motel employee (A$AP Rocky) until he drops his drug connect.
Otherwise, Linda traverses an indeterminate distance to the apartment she is banned from inhabiting, sometimes to watch horror movies on her couch but increasingly to stare up at the yawning fissure in her bedroom ceiling, which oozes, radiates, and unlocks a series of ecstatic, phantasmagorical visions that shuttle Linda down a portal to the void. Amid fluttering particles of light, an orb whooshes into view, containing a screaming, writhing child in the midst of a surgical procedure. Even in hallucination, daughter reigns resoundingly supreme. (The single spookiest moment in these sequences is its quietest: Byrne whispering an apprehensive “Mom?” as bright flecks encircle her, summoning a different maternal dynamic never again addressed.) Achieved through DIY craftsmanship and the tidal turbulence of Ruy GarcĂa and Filipe Messeder’s sound design, these fits of delirium evoke a tangle of wonder and dread.
Still, there is no special effect in Bronstein’s arsenal more virtuosic than Byrne, who won an acting prize at this year’s Berlin Film Festival yet feels like atypical casting in a role so dauntingly distressed. Byrne has bona fide credentials as a dramatic actress: she earned a Volpi Cup by the age of 21, played Medea onstage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and withstood Glenn Close at her peak macabre across five seasons of Damages (2007-2012). And yet I doubt I’m alone in thinking that Byrne has been most inspired in her long run of broad comedies; having watched a fair share of Damages, I struggle to recall a single moment of that series as clearly as Byrne’s serene, slo-mo entrance as bestie-in-waiting Helen in Bridesmaids (2011), proceeding to swan around in passive-aggressive malice like a silk gown.
As Linda, Byrne helps Bronstein center her hectic and clamorous film with a diligent and deeply committed performance that plays to her strengths as a game comedian and a steely, scalpel-stroking technician, calling on her to teeter between airy befuddlement and frantic implacability in the span of any number of scenes. (She’d be an ideal fit for the films of Todd Solondz or Whit Stillman, directors who demand a heightened, tonally fixed style from their performers.) Bronstein did not write Linda with a performer in mind but has said that she gravitated to Byrne, in part, for her inherent likability, a safeguard against the likelihood of this abrasive character alienating viewers. Yet one of the thrills of this performance is witnessing Byrne take a sledgehammer to her surface pleasantness, often in prolonged close-ups of unnerving intimacy that leave the actress with nowhere to retreat. Byrne’s finest comedic performances have been defined by deadpan precision and a general refusal of flashiness, but her achievement in this film, particularly as it progresses, is one of relinquishing control as Linda herself further unravels. The actress pushes herself to states of full-bore volatility, unleashing a tempest of last-ditch desperation, and Bronstein’s film is all the more walloping for allowing its star the space to push her expressive capacities to the brink.
Byrne’s furious certitude counterpoises a choppy final act that features a gnarly, improvised medical intervention and the lackluster emergence of a certain nineties mainstay in a key role. If the film occasionally risks Darren Aronofsky levels of allegorical hyperbole, Bronstein and Byrne continually bring it down to earth by emphasizing a torment at once mental and material. If I Had Legs takes the audience to areas of abysmal darkness; at one point, Linda watches a prison interview with Andrea Yates, the Texas woman sentenced to lifetime imprisonment in the 2000s for drowning her five children before the conviction was overturned on grounds of insanity. The view of motherhood on display here is relentlessly grueling, visceral, and untriumphant; it is nothing short of a soul-killing endeavor. Given the narrative circumstances, how could it be otherwise?
In her 2018 book Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty, the British scholar Jacqueline Rose writes that “to be a mother is to struggle to save—while also knowing that you will fail to save—your child.” Motherhood, Rose contends, is “to be faced with the prospect that the world is not getting better, that there will not be a better life for the lives you have made.” Bronstein valiantly upholds this perspective until the final moment, which, in light of the experiences that inspired the project, cannot help but be ineffably moving, no matter how illusory it may be. Her film is ultimately not without hope for its ailing daughter and spiraling mother, the possibility of days when pain recedes like waves on the shore.