Try punching instead
dir: Mary Bronstein
2025
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You sounds like both an empty threat and like the punchline to a strained, perhaps Yiddish, joke. What it is, is a film which exists as a primal scream of maternal rage aimed at channelling the frustration that comes from living in a world that pays lip service to the wonderfulness of motherhood, and the complete abandonment women face in getting the support they need to survive that comes with it.
It is not a comedy or a horror film, but it does include elements of both. I don’t even feel completely comfortable calling it a drama. Rose Byrne, Australia’s Own Rose Byrne, plays the central role, and brings all the anger, disbelief, and terror that she can muster and that the role requires.
If I was to say that it’s a fairly harrowing movie, it might make you think it’s something on a level with Requiem for a Dream or the flicks of Gasper Noé. I think that would misrepresent the flick somewhat. I’m talking about something closer akin to the recent Mike Leigh film Hard Truths, where a main character is deliberately unlikeable and gives no quarter to anyone. It is a difficult watch, but it’s not necessarily because the subject matter is too traumatic or the film is visually gory or upsetting. It’s a difficult watch because it’s about a woman no longer able to hide her dissatisfaction with being a mother.
And because it’s honest, it’s painful. People don’t want to hear it, whether they’re characters in this movie or members of an audience. They don’t want to hear women playing characters expressing how much they are not enjoying being mothers some of the time. They want neat narratives about women struggling to balance looking after little ones, themselves and any of their personal and professional ambitions, and deciding that sacrificing themselves is the best course of action for all concerned.
Not everyone wants to be a mother. Not everyone should be a mother. Whenever a woman anywhere expresses how hard she finds it to look after their own kids or kids with special needs, every fucker in existence crawls out of the woodwork to condemn them for having the audacity to be honest. That society considers childrearing solely to be the domain and heaven-sent responsibility of women only goes to show how much the system is set up to allow men to skate through with the barest amount of work required, occasionally ‘babysitting’ their own children. And of course the mother, whichever mother, doesn’t just have to cop it from shitty men; there’s a stack of women out there waiting to make them feel worse about themselves too, and even without them, they’re conditioned to berate themselves anyway.
If anything I’ve just written sounds baffling or incoherent, remember this extraordinary thing that happened recently where the top goons in an American government department conspired to not only degrade the health of countless people, but to convince the mothers of autistic children, with zero evidence, that they are the reason kids are born neurodivergent / with autism, having had the audacity to take a Tylenol pill when they were pregnant. Just because they had a headache. What selfish monsters, eh?
They could have made anything up, and that’s what they tried to confect. I wonder why.
Our main and really only character here Linda, is compelled to take part in a support group / group therapy session for mothers who feel guilty about whatever illness their kid is suffering from. The doctor assures them, as they cope with their feelings of blame and / or shame, is that it’s not their fault. She can say it a million times, but the assorted mothers there seem to shake their heads, determined to keep believing that it’s still their fault.
Linda can’t hide her disdain any longer, and screams at all of them that of course it’s their fault.
Who else’s fault would it be?
It’s certainly not that of the fathers, oh no, of course not.
Her daughter has some mystifying illness which means she can’t eat or process food properly, and has a tube going into her abdomen, through which she has to receive food because she otherwise refuses to eat anything. The doctor keeps hammering the mother with a goal weight that her child must reach by a certain deadline, otherwise Linda is again going to be proven to be a shitty mother. Until then she has to keep waking up in the middle of the night in order to pour food into a bag that goes directly into her kid’s stomach via the tube.
Sleep, elusive sleep, proves elusive for Linda, of course making everything worse. But then, to make things even more worse, a torrent of water falls from the ceiling, as a gaping hole appears in her apartment, rendering it unliveable. Hence the move to a local motel. Linda’s husband is away for work, so he’s only ever on the phone making things worse and saying unhelpful things like “calm down” or “why aren’t you with the child 24 hours a day?”
Plus, and this is evidence of the elements of this surreal story being a comedy, Linda is a therapist herself, who is so checked out and frazzled that she provides nothing but terrible advice to her clients, many of whom are terrible people who therapy will never help.
The sessions Linda has with her own therapist (Conan O’Brien) are similarly fruitless and frustrating (everything in this flick is a frustration, every attempted action is blocked or stifled deliberately), where she is on the receiving end of a therapist who isn’t engaged and can’t give her what she needs. So she has the insight to know what she needs (which is for someone, almost anyone to tell her what she should do in the face of her multitude of problems), but not enough to see what her own patients’ need, a need she greets with pat answers and cliché therapy-speak.
If she could be helped would she even be able to accept it? Almost every attempt by anyone to help is rebuffed or dismissed as people not actually listening to her, or as people not understanding what exactly she’s going through.
When she counsels a young mother, Caroline (Danielle Macdonald) she doesn’t empathise with her, telling her what she’d tell anyone, in boilerplate responses, mostly because these sessions are just a distraction from her problems, which she desperately wants to attack. But Caroline is really struggling with a parental fixation which, if you’ve experienced it, can be completely overwhelming.
And it’s not one that people properly warn you about, especially in those years where you have parents and grandparents and relatives nagging you into having children, whether against your will or not. They don’t tell you about how if you actually manage to miraculously be involved in the creation of a new human life form, their very fragility, the million ways you can start imagining that they can come to harm, can completely drown you in a whirlpool of ideation.
And that’s even when everything is absolutely fine and there aren’t congenital / inherited conditions that pop up after the birth, or something bad or random happening that starts you down this road.
So it’s not even the “does my baby have eczema because I didn’t eat enough kale when she was developing? Does he have asthma because of that one sip of white wine I had at that party? Let me start an ever-expanding list listing all the things I did and didn’t do for nine months that will now condemn them to a life of misery if they even survive childhood.” That’s down the track – this is the “I imagined this way in which the baby can be harmed, therefore not only is it going to happen but I am going to make it happen because I thought of it and I’m a terrible parent” stage that I’m talking about.
Sure, we can joke about how that happens with the first kid, driving yourself mad with your own caution, and by the time you have the next one / last one you’re so inured and blasé that you practically let your pet dog raise them, but that stage can be utterly terrifying, and if there isn’t release from the constant stream of your cyclical thinking, it can certainly drive you mad(der). This isn’t a flick specifically about post-partum depression (that the young mother clearly / maybe is suffering from), but there is certainly scope to argue that much of the flick is less a Lynchian descent into the suburban underworld and more an extended psychotic break experienced by a mum pushed too far and left unsupported. Parenthood and anxiety / depression / mental illness do not make for sunny skies and fun parades, though most of us still get through it and our kids aren’t too harmed by it all. Not all do.
The hole. The hole in the ceiling. Sometimes a hole is just a hole, sometimes it’s representative of the unwanted and intrusive thoughts breaking through from the dark parts of our psyches into the clean ‘real’ world, which people other than Linda can’t see or look at directly.
At one point, gazing perplexed into the void, Linda sees / imagines some glowing gold motes of light, and whispers “Mom?” That’s one of the most fascinating moments of the film, for me. I mean maybe it serves a practical purpose as well, because it hints that one of the many reasons Linda feels helpless and unsupported is because her mother isn’t around, because she’s probably no longer amongst the living. But the multitude of elements that the ‘breach’ in reality could represent adds to the flick’s possible complexity. At the very least it adds to the surreal atmosphere.
The hole represents lots or it represents nothing, but at the very least it represents an obstacle to Linda and her kid living again in the comfortable embrace of domesticity, and she cannot seem to get anyone to fix it, in the ways that none of the problems she or her kid faces have solutions.
Until they do. Of course, part of the problem with reviewing a movie where you’re not sure what’s happening for ‘real’ within the context of the movie, or whether it’s the hallucinations of the protagonist is that you hit the ‘fiction within a fiction’ problem, which means which element do you really care about. You end up caring or thinking about all of it, or none of it.
When the young mother, terrified out of her mind, abandons baby Riley at Linda’s office, you can see the logic of it: she’s driven herself mad thinking of all the ways she could harm the baby, so naturally if she gets away from the baby, the baby is safer. Of course this just represents another problem for Linda to solve, and she has plenty. When she calls Caroline’s partner, who starts ranting about Caroline sitting on her arse all day doing nothing, and that looking after the baby is not his job, because his job is to Work, and the job of Women is to look after Babies, well, sure, you wish you could punch him in his stupid mouth, but it’s also practically the film’s thesis spelled out in capital letters.
And yet when Caroline reappears towards the end of the film, it adds surreality on top of surreality, because whether it “happened” or not, it mimics the actions that Linda finally resorts to after baffling scenes involving the return of her husband (Christian Slater in a naval uniform!), and the extraction of her daughter’s feeding tube, which a conservative estimate would put at being about a kilometre long. So I don’t know nothing about nothing as to what feels true to Linda, what actually happened, and what we’re meant to accept about the very last scene, involving mother and daughter, the daughter we finally seen clearly, something which the movie has avoided until that moment.
However strange it might seem, it feels like there is an emotional truth to everything that’s going on here. This feels like how a mother felt helpless in the face of her kid’s illness, and a lot of terrible experiences, imagined or otherwise, ensued, but they survived, the kid survived, so… yay?
Rose Byrne is sterling throughout. It is a master class in acting that she delivers, and I very much love how absolutely determined she is not to elicit sympathy from other characters or from the audience. She never, in no way, panders. The camera spends most of its time locked in on her face and she works those facial muscles like an athlete in their prime. Every pinched expression, every look of disbelief, every full throated lament that she’s not being seen for who she is, rather than her function (mother!). I’ve seen her be great in things, and mediocre in others, but I never expected this.
She cries, a few times, how could you not, but more often, she screams with rage, and so she should. She has the perpetual air of someone who didn’t get anywhere enough sleep last night, of the addict that would just rather zone out for a while, the person others don’t want to make eye contact with in the room, of the mother who has sacrificed almost everything for her kid without even getting some kind of positive result for it all, who cannot handle being told to calm down one more time or have someone suggest that she do some breathing exercises.
She’s had enough. She is every woman / mother, and she’s one mother, and she has to snap, otherwise this bullshit will never end.
A stunning film, one of the few great, truly compelling flicks to come out this year.
9 times even the sea off the coast of Montauk, Long Island won’t take her out of 10
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“I’ll be better. I promise, I’ll be better.” – that's what they all say - If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
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