The ceiling caves in at the outset of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, the Rose Byrne-starring second feature from Mary Bronstein, her first film in 17 years. In 2008, she debuted with the sour, misanthropic mumblecore classic Yeast, so based on the trailer and your history with Bronstein, your expectation for this latest might be a fraught, raw, indie depiction of motherhood, with Byrne gunning for a trophy in a makeup-stripped, dressed-down, messy character sketch. You will not be proven wrong exactly, but the hole that opens up in Byrne’s ceiling in Montauk at the beginning of IIHLIKY looks less like a leak-produced break and more like a perfect alien gaping maw, threatening to subsume anyone in its radius, something out of Jordan Peele’s Nope. As the camera begins to slowly travel up and through the hole, like a birth canal, Carpenter-aping ambient techno thrums and the A24 logo flashes in crimson as the credits roll. It’s an intro worthy of Oz Perkins, which helps you immediately orient yourself to the fact that what you’re watching is a horror film.
Byrne plays Linda, a psychologist in Montauk with a daughter who has an undefined physical disorder that comes with weight goals and a feeding tube and a machine that administers a nutrient slurry from what looks like an infusion bag (and crucially, beeps incessantly). Linda’s husband is away, on week three of an eight-week job (Christian Slater, who exists in the movie as a disembodied, judgmental voice on the other end of the phone, yet another source of pressure), and in his absence Byrne is left alone to do the ferrying to and from school as well as the clinic where her daughter receives treatment — this all, while holding down her full-time job. The hole in the ceiling is the final straw, another crisis to manage unsuccessfully, the stressor that begins unraveling her life, as she holes up with cheap wine and greasy food in a shitty motel with her daughter — who Bronstein wisely doesn’t show, both to avoid audience attachment to a precious child and to drive home the point that in the everyday stress she inflicts on Linda, she can’t see her either — trying and failing to hold it all together.
Bronstein’s sophomore effort is a hybrid. It is part parental horror that has its roots in classics of the genre like Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Omen, but that we’ve seen revived in a wave of “elevated horror” over the past decade like The Babadook, Insidious, Hereditary, and Goodnight Mommy. It’s a genre that mines the fear and anxiety of parenthood, that you suck at being a parent and are fucking your child up in daily increments, as well as what at times feels like the gleeful sadism of the child toward their parent. What makes If I Had Legs I’d Kick You unique, and remarkable, is there are no direct supernatural elements. It uses the parlance and tone of horror to relate its story, but there are no ghosts or monsters to hide behind, which only raises the stakes, makes the action more fraught and horrifying as you feel the real consequences of a story grounded in the heightened reality of an unwell person with a sick child dependent on her.
The second influence on the film is the creative circle around it. Bronstein’s aforementioned first film was intimate, a handmade and handheld portrait of self-loathing insecurity and codependence that was delivered in the style of Mumblecore in that it was semi-professional actors working out semi-improvised real world scenarios on a non-existent budget. But similar to her husband Ronald’s debut Frownland, which Mary co-starred in, Yeast wasn’t about the sweet aimlessness of hipster youth in Brooklyn. Instead, it presented a sour, dark, and misanthropic vision of its characters, their fucked up relationships, and their world. Fitting, then, that Ronald has essentially served as a third Safdie brother since 2009, working as co-writer and co-editor of their projects beginning with their debut, Daddy Long Legs, which he starred in. The films the trio have made together continue the project of Frownland and Yeast, applying increasingly accomplished production design via camerawork and sound to stories about miserable, abrasive people in dire straits, and so it’s not surprising that If I Had Legs I’d Kick You comes courtesy of production company Elara, run by Ronald and the Safdies. (Conan O’Brien, meanwhile, came to the project through his friend Adam Sandler, star of the Safdies project Uncut Gems.) In the starry cast, in the application of sound (from Felipe Messeder, replicating the brilliant work Skip Lievsay has done with the Safdies, and Josh most recently in Marty Supreme), in the fearless unpleasantness Rose Byrne and how cruel the film is to her, how disliked she is by the characters around her (like A$AP Rocky, turning in a completely different and even better performance than what he accomplished this summer in Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest), in the built atmosphere of anxious chaos — in all of this, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You feels like an expansion of the greater Safdie/Bronstein unit’s mindmeld.
All of these films, from downbeat character sketches to taut thrillers, are about people down on their luck, being tortured by life and circumstance (often thanks to their own poor decisions). What IIHLIKY reveals most explicitly is how close all these films are to straight horror, that by a simple adjustment of a degree or two, Good Times could easily have been a scary film. Which is not to say that Bronstein’s latest is derivative work — this is very much the director’s film, and she brings a mother’s personal history, as well as a child caregiver’s professional experience, to Linda’s harrowing journey (Bronstein worked in the New York City hospital system, ran an underground daycare, and had experience raising a very sick child of her own in the years between her films). Her failings and failures are more intimate than anything we’ve seen from past Elara productions.
Linda is stuffing her face with pizza cheese rolled like a blunt and getting in blood feuds with Elementary school crossing guards. She’s not connecting with a postpartum mother/patient she should have a deep connection to and empathy for. She’s replicating the unwanted advances via transference dreams another patient has for her to her therapist and supervisor, played by O’Brien. Linda is a character you want to hug and shake simultaneously, eliciting a still visceral but altogether different emotion than anything Howard Ratner has ever provoked in a viewer. IIHLIKY ingeniously mines genre devices to elicit a particular discomfiting feeling in the audience, of being perpetually overwhelmed and defeated, being worn down and afraid that you’re showing that wear and tear to the world. Bronstein manifests the paranoia that you are unfit to raise your kid.
At the film’s end, Linda breaks and commits her most horrific act, dangerous and unforgiveable, then runs to the ocean in what appears to be an attempted suicide. She can’t even get that right, thrown out of the deep blue back onto the beach over and over again, in yet another instance of the film torturing its protagonist. Linda opens her eyes, on her back on wet sand, and we finally see her beautiful daughter looming over her. Linda’s final words to the girl is a phrase this writer has to stop and repeat most days, and if you have kids, you probably have too: “I’ll be better, I promise, I’ll be better.” After two hours of Bronstein’s merciless pace and tone, it’s a last line that will crush you.
DIRECTOR: Mary Bronstein; CAST: Rose Byrne, Conan O’Brien, Danielle Macdonald, A$AP Rocky, Christian Slater; DISTRIBUTOR: A24; IN THEATERS: October 17; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 53 min.
Published as part of NYFF 2025 — Dispatch 6.
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