Rating: R | Runtime: 113 minutes
Release Date: October 10th, 2025 (USA)
Studio: A24
Director(s): Mary Bronstein
Writer(s): Mary Bronstein

I just want someone to tell me what to do.

Why is everyone being so mean to Linda (Rose Byrne)? Her husband (Christian Slater) calls her while he’s away for two months captaining a sea vessel just to tell her that her job as a therapist isn’t hard and he’d love to switch places to struggle with work and their sick daughter instead. Her child (Delaney Quinn) shrilly screams about everything like it will kill her and demands Linda hold her hand to walk two feet. Her therapist (Conan O’Brien) refuses to answer basic questions. And strangers all but tell her she’s a terrible human being.

Why? Because that’s what Linda believes she deserves. That’s what she needs to hear to keep hating herself for everything that’s gone wrong. Everything she has no control over. Every literal and figurative hole forming beneath her feet and above her head to make it so she cannot breathe long enough to calm down let alone sleep. Everything that she tells her own patients (yes, she’s a therapist too) isn’t real. Linda knows what’s wrong and what must be done, but that doesn’t mean she can just flip a switch and do it.

We can’t therefore assume the filter through which we see If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is reality when writer/director Mary Bronstein is constantly jerking her lead character awake when she isn’t even sleeping. It’s an unnerving technique both in its surprising visual jolt and its ability to make us question if Linda has been asleep this whole time. While I wondered this fact in a literal sense for a good portion of the film, however, my suspicions soon moved to the metaphorical. She is physically present in every frame, but she’s definitely not all there.

Everything is heightened as a result. Not in a way that positions Linda as being crazy, though. There’s truth to the chaos, cacophony, and frustration. Like when your anxiety is so high you find yourself overreacting to things that bother you. Small things start to feel like big things. Big things become impossible to even fathom let alone problem solve. And you can’t escape the sensory echoes that bounce around your body to simultaneously keep you on high alert for the next thing coming and stuck in a shame spiral thinking about the prior one.

This state of tension is where Linda lives and it’s where the film remains for the duration as her world implodes. Bronstein operates in mirrors—the shattered and stacked shards within the uninhabitable bedroom that was flooded with water and asbestos from a ceiling cave-in as well as the parallels between what her character is experiencing and the people around her. Caroline’s (Danielle Macdonald) desire to escape her own child’s issues? Stephen’s (Daniel Zolghadri) forbidden patient/therapist attraction? Linda is stuck in the same patterns.

While she still has the wherewithal to talk them through their issues, she refuses to do the work for herself. Linda becomes her own therapist’s worst nightmare. She avoids the doctor (Bronstein) trying to help her work through the mental fatigue of caring for her sick child. And she lashes out at those who act as entitled and superior as she does to others (see the motel attendant, parking attendant, etc.). Linda cannot be alone, but she never feels more alone than those moments when she’s forced to be by her daughter’s side.

Cue the alcohol and drugs to help her dissociate. Cue the bad decisions like befriending A$AP Rocky’s James to score narcotics and have someone around she can treat like crap since she has no real connection to him beyond that use. Cue the self-destructive impulse to blow everything up whether it be her own wellbeing, her colleagues’ trust, or her daughter’s therapy. What will make her feel better right now regardless of its impact on others? What will make all the noise and doubt and guilt go away?

The answer is, of course, nothing, and Bronstein never shies away from proving it by putting Linda in an ever-worsening state of sanity. And just like we laugh at horror films to relieve our stress, we laugh at these scenarios on-screen too. Bronstein wants us to have this reaction. She intentionally sprinkles dark comedy into the soul-crushing drama so that we understand Linda’s irritation. The way the men all act. The annoyance born from every one of Quinn’s line readings. Byrne’s deer-in-headlights reaction when caught in a lie.

It’s an intense ride that won’t be easily shaken for those who can’t relate to Linda’s descent let alone those who do. A large portion of that is due to Byrne’s tour-de-force performance, but also credit Bronstein’s aesthetic decision to never show Quinn’s face. By pushing the child to the fringes, we can more easily absorb into Linda’s emotional state. We begin to despise her and want to escape her grip too. Because that’s how this works. Our pain inevitably dehumanizes everyone else. Not only won’t they help us, their mere presence makes it so much worse.

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Rose Byrne in IF I HAD LEGS I’D KICK YOU; by Logan White, courtesy of A24.