Falling down: "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You"

Our various Academies, in their wisdom, have overlooked or disregarded Jennifer Lawrence's turn in Lynne Ramsay's Die My Love: too much - too messy, perhaps - in a film that didn't find the groundswell of popular support some critics hoped it would. It's left to Mary Bronstein's If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, then, to represent the outer limits of female performance and endurance as the 2025-26 awards season enters its home straight: here is a familiar face being put through the ringer and otherwise pushed to her very limits in a dark indie comedy-drama from the folks who previously brought you the Safdies' Good Time and Uncut Gems. The face belongs to Rose Byrne, taking a stride or seven beyond her preliminary work on Apple TV's Physical in the role of Linda, a people-pleasing working mother trying to hold it together while running the gauntlet of modern life: a near-permanently absent husband, a daughter with an eating disorder and anxiety besides, domestic plumbing issues that result in her once-perfect Montauk home being flooded even before Bronstein has flashed her Evan Dando-sounding title on screen in horror-movie crimson. Certainly, there are horrific elements in play here: we're watching a potentially fatal existential crisis collide with something more literal. For Bronstein, modern life is a matter of treading water, while hoping the sky isn't also going to cave in on you; her film crystallises a moment where all our pre-existing structures and sureties have been undermined and nobody really seems to know what day it is, in large part because the majority of us have been forced to scrabble around like blue-arsed flies to keep ever more feral wolves from the door. The daughter's anxiety is understandable, to say the least.

In a typically Safdiean manoeuvre, Bronstein isn't trading in plot so much as pile-up, a process made literal in her antsy driving scenes (every time Linda gets behind a wheel, you fear someone's going to get hurt) and the fractious answerphone messages that accumulate as our newly displaced heroine is tugged this way and that. The droll fun here - if fun's the word - is that everybody Linda bumps into appears to be undergoing their own idea of their own worst day. Over the phone, Linda's husband is repeatedly short with her; he sounds like George Costanza - and the movie gains a dimension if you approach it as a treatise on what it might be like to find yourself married to George Costanza - but turns out to be Christian Slater. The doctor treating the daughter - played by Bronstein herself, the thinking person's Gal Gadot - is prone to nagging and fingerpointing; a jobsworth motel clerk (Ivy Wolk) won't serve Linda the alcohol that might at least take an edge or two off; her shrink (Conan O'Brien) veers between distractible and outright evasive. It's very funny when we discover, in one of the rare moments when the protagonist can return to her day job, that Linda is herself a therapist, obliged to spend her days listening to patients who fall on a spectrum between needy and sincerely troubled and who generally only confirm her in her harassed outlook. At best, she brings empathy to her task: she knows exactly what her clients are going through, partly because she too is processing some of it mid-session. But you can equally forgive her for seeming distracted or brusque or sharp, as she often is; it's the errors of personal and professional judgement that concern Bronstein, and therefore us. In cataloguing those errors, though, Bronstein succeeds in showcasing a performance that really does feel like an entire, complex universe. Until the closing moments, we don't see the daughter and husband, so fixated is the filmmaker's gaze on the agonised contours of Byrne's face; in some ways, it's a directorial compliment (she sees Linda in all her agitated and spiralling glory), but this camera also seems another of the pressures bearing down on this woman. 

Byrne's myriad acting nominations this season, then, are on one level a reflection of the degree of difficulty involved here. This is a role to keep an actor awake at night: for just shy of two hours, If I Had Legs is all about Linda, and a sensitive performer might well worry whether she was being heroic enough, or at all. (One semi-legit criticism - which the film obliquely addresses over the course of Linda's haphazard relationship with a motel handyman, played very capably by A$AP Rocky - would be that these are first-world, white-lady problems.) An attractive performer, meanwhile, might also fret about how zonked Bronstein wants to make her look in those mercilessly tight close-ups. Yet Byrne doesn't just withstand such scrutiny, she responds with a (characteristically Antipodean?) resilience and fortitude; she remains extremely relatable, even - especially, perhaps - as Linda takes to screaming into a pillow. Bronstein acted in her husband Ronald's Frownland, one of this century's most radically uncompromising indie propositions, in that it didn't want to be liked (or, really, sat through) at all. Some trace of that film persists into this one via the black hole in Linda's ceiling, which becomes increasingly fraught with meaning, some of it structural, some of it depressive, some of it maternal. If I Had Legs is, however, a product of a more emollient imagination, and a more commercially minded studio in A24: it knows the value of a star who might better sell us on all this stress, and of the mordant humour that helps to lighten the load. O'Brien's normie presence is expertly deployed as someone who has got it together but wants you to know it, and I feel I should also praise the hamster whose fate speaks - maybe squeaks - to bruising lived experience on the Bronsteins' part. It's a tough old world out there, and Linda's is not a crisis that could be eased much by any emotional support animal - but it's some feat for an indie film released this far into the 21st century to remind you of Jill Clayburgh's heyday and those old Cassavetes-Gena Rowlands collaborations.

If I Had Legs I'd Kick You opens in selected cinemas from Friday.