"If only I could I would kick you" is an extra-sensory nightmare The film by Mary Bronstein starring Oscar nominee Rose Byrne

What strikes most about If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is the film’s ability to make the invisible visible. To give full expression to the imagination, to put suggestive and surreal elements into writing and then transport them onto the screen, returning exactly the sensations that the screenwriter and director Mary Bronstein, together with her protagonist Rose Byrne, wanted to make the audience feel.

It’s all because of a hole in the ceiling. Forced to fight for a few days with a plumbing problem that made their home unlivable, Linda (Byrne) and her daughter find a makeshift solution by staying temporarily in a motel while her husband is away for work. The woman must do everything on her own: she must think about how to repair the damage, take care of her daughter who suffers from a congenital illness, and try not to go crazy while everything around her seems to be about to collapse, metaphorically and literally given the void above her bed.

The Real Themes of the Film

Linda, however, does not want to see, and this is exactly what If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is about. About not wanting to face problems, whether one’s own or others’, preferring to turn away and look elsewhere. Bronstein makes this clear through two directorial choices. The first is depriving the viewer of the daughter’s face, intubated and forced by the parent’s desire to free herself from what feels like a constraint in order to start living a normal life. The second is the hole to which Linda’s eyes and mind return repeatedly, a liminal boundary where one can get lost and search for contact with oneself.

Or, sometimes, simply with the desire to disappear. Linda allows herself a few too many drinks and does not reject the use of drugs. Anesthetics for a frenetic life in which she feels she is about to go crazy, a sensation that the viewer ends up feeling on their own skin, as if the centripetal force of the hole were attracting not only the protagonist but also those watching her story. The same happens with the endless, suffocating days in which the protagonist feels she is losing control, gradually confusing the audience, who in turn see what is real fade behind the fears, thoughts, and everyday difficulties of the woman.

Challenging Social Conventions

Linda’s days become a constant challenge to conventions, to the impossibility of completing even the simplest tasks because of a weight that crushes her and that, gradually, is also felt by the audience in mind and chest. A collective psychosis that unsettles and disorients both protagonist and viewers, on the same boat when trying to find a solution to the unspoken chaos in which Linda is imprisoned and from which she must try to escape. The protagonist, in fact, speaks yet no one hears her. She tries to open up, but is constantly rejected.

It is ironic that she can no longer communicate with others despite herself playing the role of a psychologist, who in turn needs help, except that even her own colleague does not listen to her - to be fair he is a colleague from the same practice and it would not be professional, played by Conan O’Brien. Everything Linda cannot express is reflected in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.

Imaginary spaces become fertile ground to get lost, to question the meaning of things, how we feel in the world. And in the film we do so through the story of a woman and mother who no longer knows how to come to terms with the difficulties she is going through, continuously entering and exiting her mind, living more through epidermal and visual perceptions than through concrete information.

The Success of a True Story

Free and evocative is If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. It is the gradual disconnection from reality that Mary Bronstein narrates through cinema, giving even what moves inside a form, a light, a color. Byrne delivers a brilliant performance that earned her the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival, a Golden Globe and an Academy Award nomination. She is neurotic, relentless, exhausted and searching for changes that do not seem to arrive.

She is also humorous, a trait we know belongs to the actress and that connects to the film’s surreal comedy, like the car scene with a restless hamster for which Bronstein said she was inspired by Jack Nicholson in The Shining. A work born from a semi-personal experience, since the director also had to face her daughter’s illness, which finds sublimation in cinema. Yet it does not remain an isolated case, an introspective unicum, but instead opens up to the world. Indeed, to an entire universe.