The Virtuosic Maternal Freakout of “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”

“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” a nerve-shredding dark comedy from the director and screenwriter Mary Bronstein, is the latest and surely most exhaustive iteration of an idea that has gained increasing traction in American movies: motherhood is hell, and a mother enduring that hell should say so, without fear of judgment. Marielle Heller’s “Nightbitch” (2024), drawn from Rachel Yoder’s novel, laid out a higher-concept version of this argument: it showed us an artist so drained and defeated by life with a toddler that she transformed into a feral canine at night—a quasi-supernatural twist that, for all its cleverness, felt oddly neutered in the translation from page to screen. The director Maggie Gyllenhaal dramatized maternal ambivalence more incisively in her adaptation, from 2021, of the Elena Ferrante novel “The Lost Daughter,” about a middle-aged professor who spends a coastal holiday reflecting on the failure of being, in her words, “an unnatural mother.”

Bronstein’s film—her first since her début feature, “Yeast” (2008)—boasts its own version of that line. “I’m one of those people who’s not supposed to be a mom,” a mother named Linda (Rose Byrne) laments. Her young daughter (Delaney Quinn) has a chronic gastrointestinal illness, and her husband, a ship captain, is away at sea. In the space of several fraught days, an already difficult situation is compounded by nightmarish setbacks. An enormous hole opens up in the ceiling of Linda’s apartment, flooding the place and forcing her and her daughter to relocate to a motel. Linda, who is a therapist, must balance her job with the inevitably time-consuming repairs, which grind to a halt when a contractor has a family emergency. (Such emergencies are legion in this movie.) Linda also drags her daughter to a clinic for regular treatments, none of which seem to do any good. There, she is repeatedly scolded, first by a testy parking attendant (Mark Stolzenberg), and then by a doctor (Bronstein), who warns Linda of consequences if her daughter doesn’t soon reach her target weight of fifty pounds.

Bronstein, her every utterance brimming with deadpan passive-aggression, was shrewd to cast herself as one of Linda’s many antagonists. It’s a mordantly self-aware touch, as if she were confessing to, but also exacerbating, her own heavy-handed tactics behind the camera, as she pushes Linda toward wild dramatic extremes. But Linda can handle those extremes, up to a point. Early on at the clinic, her daughter, identifying the main difference between her parents, describes her dad as firm but her mom as “stretchable”—an assessment that Linda rejects, clearly stung, but which her every subsequent action bears out. It’s a measure of the film’s fairness that it sees this quality as both strength and weakness. It is, after all, Linda’s pliability that allows her to laugh rather than cry over an almost-ruined dinner, just as it’s her considerable patience that helps her get through a stream of difficult patients at her workplace, called the Center for Psychological Arts. (They’re played by the actors Danielle Macdonald, Daniel Zolghadri, and Ella Beatty, among others.) But Linda’s flexibility can backfire, too, as when she caves in to her daughter’s incessant demands and buys her a pet hamster—an ill-advised decision, with grisly yet mercifully short-lived consequences.

Byrne the actor turns out to be stretchable in the best sense; her performance is a marvel of tragicomic elasticity. Whatever she’s doing at any given moment—rolling her eyes, sleepily mumbling instructions into her phone, dragging herself down a hallway in a haze, or releasing her frustration in a barely muffled scream—she has the rare ability to seem at once psychologically stripped down and physically invigorated by the unyielding scrutiny of the camera. (The director of photography Christopher Messina shot much of the film in extreme closeup.) In some of Byrne’s more memorable big-screen roles—a rich, pampered queen bee in “Bridesmaids” (2011), an imperious Bulgarian arms dealer in “Spy” (2015)—she made a natural comic villain, a smug, hyper-competent rival to a bumbling misfit heroine. “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” flips that script in inspired fashion; here, Linda is the bumbler, or so everyone around her seems to think.

As in “The Lost Daughter,” a beach beckons powerfully. “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” is set in Montauk, and the water seems to exert an almost gravitational pull on Linda’s psyche, as if the sea’s raging undercurrents are of a piece with her own. Like “Nightbitch,” too, Bronstein’s film has an element of nocturnal horror: Linda doesn’t turn into a dog, but as she wanders the neighborhood after dark her demons feel thoroughly unleashed. The delineations of night and day are so stark that, at times, her adventures take on an almost vampiric quality: when the sun is out, she seems drained, boxed in, and all but immobilized by her schedule. After nightfall, at least, while her child sleeps, she can sneak out for a bottle of wine, a puff of weed, or something stronger. She attempts to procure the latter with the help of a motel superintendent, James, with whom she strikes up a goofily unpredictable, often combative friendship. (James is played by the rapper A$AP Rocky, in his second strong performance of the year, after Spike Lee’s “Highest 2 Lowest.”) These are fugitive pleasures, but for Linda, they’re a crucial respite. They allow her to convince herself, if only for an hour or two, that she still has some semblance of a life of her own.

When “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” premièred, earlier this year, at the Sundance and Berlin International Film Festivals, its non-stop panic-attack aesthetic prompted critical invocations of the brothers Josh and Benny Safdie, whose films, such as “Daddy Longlegs” (2009), “Good Time” (2017), and especially “Uncut Gems” (2019), made for similarly stressful viewing. The comparisons were logical; Bronstein is married to the filmmaker, editor, and actor Ronald Bronstein, who has worked on the Safdies’ films in numerous capacities and served as one of the producers of “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.” Unwise as it may be to assume a Safdie net of familial influences, it’s hard to avoid them here, especially in the case of a movie that is especially attuned to the nuances of marital give-and-take.

From scene to scene, “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” can feel so formally aggressive, verging on assaultive, that it takes a moment to appreciate that it’s also a movie of strategic elisions and structured absences. Linda’s daughter is never identified by name, and she is often heard but seldom seen. In Bronstein’s riskiest formal gambit, the child’s face is carefully hidden from view, in every shot except one. The girl is, instead, abstracted into various body parts: a pair of legs dangling from a toilet, or a belly from which a feeding tube protrudes—an image that emphasizes her near-umbilical dependence on Linda. At night, the girl is reduced to a cluster of noises: the beeps and whirs of a machine that she’s hooked up to while she sleeps, or the whimpers and snores emanating from the baby monitor that Linda carries during her long walks after dark. When she’s awake, though, Linda’s daughter is a voice, and a highly active, spirited one, forever laughing, chattering, demanding, and whining up a storm. The concealment of the daughter’s face is a blunt but effective representation of one of Bronstein’s central ideas: how the people we love can drain us to the point where we no longer actually see them for who they are.