At the Angelika Film Center yesterday, I went to see If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, a 2025 psychological horror film written and directed by Mary Bronstein. The film stars Rose Byrne as Linda, a therapist who is struggling with a lot of stress and mental anguish. Her daughter (Delaney Quinn), whose name is never given and whose face is always offscreen, has a mysterious illness where she uses a feeding tube in her stomach at night, and Linda is pressured by her daughter's doctor to make sure she makes her goal weight of 50 lbs by a deadline so that the tube can be removed. Dr. Spring (Bronstein) repeatedly tells her to come in for meetings, with the threat that if Linda isn't reaching those goals, that the care for her daughter will be re-assessed. Her husband Charles (Christian Slater, mostly heard through phone calls) is away on a work trip, and only calls her to criticize her and complain, and treats her as if she just sits on her butt all day as a therapist and doesn't do real work.
Things get worse when the family's Montauk apartment floods from a collapse in the bedroom ceiling, and Linda and her daughter must stay in a motel. Through this catastrophe, Linda is trying to manage her job as a therapist, with a patient (Danielle Macdonald) who brings her baby to sessions because she's afraid of leaving her child alone or being seen as a bad mother; seeing her own therapist (Conan O'Brien), who is unhelpful and sees her as a mental drain; trying to get her daughter, who frequently complains and whines off-camera, to behave; fielding calls from Dr. Spring, fielding calls from her husband; calling to get the ceiling fixed and being given the runaround and hung up on, and picturing the hole in the ceiling as getting bigger and deeper and more cavernous, a metaphor for her own deteriorating mental and psychological state.
The film is unsettling to watch, from both the sound design that drove up the tension, and the tight close-ups on Byrne's face in the first few scenes of the film, where her daughter and the doctor are heard off-camera, and setting the mood with lines about how her daughter sees her mother as putty that she can stretch, and Linda refuting that claim, despite all of her sacrifices. Byrne is fantastic in playing a woman who is being pushed to her limits, pressured by external voices to do everything right, and blamed for anything going wrong. She unwinds at night by leaving her daughter alone in the motel room to go get wine at the motel shop, where the clerk (Ivy Wolk) is snarky about not selling her wine past 2 AM, and develops an almost-friendship with the motel superintendent James (A$AP Rocky), whose calm demeanor helps her in her time of chaos.
I felt anxious watching the film, jumping a little bit at a couple of early scares with the collapsing ceiling, and felt for Linda being pulled in different directions and wanting to snap. This film is listed as a comedy-drama, but it felt more like a horror film to me. It doesn't feel like a film I'd watch again because of its intensity, but I enjoyed being in the theater and feeling stuck in the madness of the same character, the theater like the black hole like she imagined her dwindling psyche to be.
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