At its core, “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” confronts the unspeakable: maternal ambivalence. When a mother feels she can’t take it anymore, when the sacrifices demanded by motherhood feel unbearable, when the desire to escape looms. These feelings are rarely acknowledged—by society or by mothers themselves—and that silence is what compelled writer-director Mary Bronstein to make this film.

Trained as an actor and previously the director of “Yeast” (2008), Bronstein was forced into a 17-year hiatus from filmmaking while caring for her ill child. She conceived “If I Had Legs” in a cheap motel near San Diego as her daughter underwent treatment. In an interview, Bronstein outlined the questions driving the film:
If my entire existence is focused on my child, where did I go?

Did I cause this?
What was I put on this earth to do?

While not autobiographical, the story centers on Linda (a performance by  Rose Byrne worthy of her Academy Award nomination), a therapist and a mother who has put her life on hold to care for her seriously ill seven-year-old daughter. The film opens in a three-way therapy session, framed in an unbroken close-up of only Linda’s face as she reacts to her daughter and the pediatrician. Throughout the film, we never see the daughter’s face, a deliberate choice that may hold the key to its unsettling, ambiguous ending.

Linda should be someone we hate. She’s selfish, abrasive, drinks too much, and leaves her child unattended at night. And yet empathy is unavoidable. Her circumstances are crushing, her isolation nearly complete.

Christian Slater is perfectly obnoxious as her absent, sea-captain husband, oblivious to her descent into madness. The crises stack up: a patient abandons her baby in Linda’s office; the daughter’s doctor threatens a chilling “higher level of care” if the child—on a feeding tube—fails to gain weight; and then there’s the hole in the ceiling.

When the ceiling collapses, the film tilts into an altered reality shaped by her unraveling psyche. The unfixable hole becomes a potent metaphor—echoing the hole in her daughter’s stomach, a monstrous embodiment of Linda’s deepest fears. From here, the film increasingly resembles psychological horror, its dread amplified by sound design, lighting, and dark, unsettling humor.

Conan O’Brien is unexpectedly effective in his dramatic film debut as Linda’s judgmental, withholding therapist. The closest thing to kindness comes from James, the motel super, played by A$AP Rocky—though even he ultimately wants something from her too.

Threaded throughout are references to mothers accused or convicted of killing their children: Andrea Yates,  who drowned her children, a murdering nanny, and the Australian mother wrongfully convicted after a dingo took her baby. These cases underline the film’s central accusation: society’s indifference to women’s suffering, and its refusal to listen when mothers say they are drowning.

The film is difficult to watch—and impossible to look away from. Like a slow-motion train wreck or a monster movie, it rattles the nerves even as we gasp and want to know what happens next.