Annoying child characters are a dime a dozen in Hollywood films, but that’s generally by accident, bad writing making them too precocious or like irritating little adults. When a movie actively sets out to have a child annoy you, though, that’s when you’ll find yourself stretched to the brink of your endurance (see: The Babadook). Into this small microgenre drops Mary Bronstein’s oddly titled If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, a brilliantly acted and mercilessly oppressive psychological drama about the breakdown of a mother trying to care for one of the hardest-to-love kids to hit the big screen in years.
This mother is Linda (Rose Byrne), a therapist who is rapidly unravelling as her unnamed daughter fails to get better from a vague disorder that means she must be fed through a loud, gross tube system, all while the pair must live in a motel after a disastrous leak puts a hole in the roof of her apartment. There is never a moment in which something is not *demanded* of Linda, whether it’s as a mother (her husband is away for months at a time with his work) or a professional (one of her clients, an unstable young mum played by Danielle Macdonald has gone missing).
If I Had Legs… is, of course, exhausting, one of the least pleasant watches you could have all year. Bronstein puts us right in Linda’s head, with claustrophobic compositions and wildly irritating sound design of cries, beeps, crashes, and screams that more than once made me just want to stop the whole film entirely. It’s undeniably, radically effective at putting you in the shoes of a harried working mother who never gets a minute of real rest, though also pretty impossible to casually recommend to anyone; this is a waking nightmare of stress.
None of this could work without Byrne’s fantastic, agonised performance, Linda’s misery and rage and then subsequent guilt around those feelings etched on her face – that Oscar nomination, and Byrne’s status as second favourite to actually win Lead Actress, is hard earned. Most recent films about the trials and tribulations of motherhood rather blur into one generic story of adversity, but Byrne and Bronstein make Linda feel completely original, a character that consistently avoids cliché, a great match of performance and writing. Her story is not designed to be universal but instead a sort of worst-case scenario that is painful to even watch at a distance, let alone actually have to survive day to day.
I’ve seen If I Had Legs described in places as a dark comedy and, while I wouldn’t go that far (if anything, this is closer to horror), some dark laughs are provided here and there, mostly by Conan O’Brien. Playing completely against type as Linda’s own therapist, he taps into a kind of sadistic placidity that is funny in its absurdity; watching him harden into a look of blank impatience as Linda bares her soul and begs for some sort of real help is the closest the film gets to a running gag, and it does land.
With Josh Safdie on the producers list here – Bronstein’s husband Ronald is Safdie’s regular co-writer on anxiety-fests like Uncut Gems and Good Time – some of that chaotic style does make its way into If I Had Legs (there’s even a surreal cosmic interlude that looks *exactly* like its equivalent scenes in Gems and Marty Supreme). Visually, though, If I Had Legs doesn’t really stack up to those comparison points, which have a fluency and confidence that this lacks – quite a few scenes are literally too dark, getting lost in shadows that actually weaken the grim immersion that the story relies on.
‘Horrible’ and ‘excruciating’ aren’t often words said when recommending something and there’s little to no chance that If I Had Legs I’d Kick You will become a film anyone returns to with any sort of regularity. But to see a filmmaker commit so hard to this specific mode and achieve their goals so unreservedly is still a thrill of its own. Come for the Rose Byrne performance, stay for a mind-melting soundscape, and then be glad you get to leave.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 