My wife and I first fell for Rose Byrne watching her volatile, oddly tender friendship with Seth Rogen implode and recombine in Platonic. When we heard she starred in a film called If I Had Legs I’d Kick You—with Conan O’Brien cast against type as a pinch-faced therapist—we were curious in the wary, “this could be a disaster” sense.
We had just abandoned the TV series Ponies, unable to buy the premise that two American widows had any credible reason to embed themselves as spies in 1970s Russia. On a shrug and a whim, I said, “Let’s try the Rose Byrne movie.” Within minutes, I knew we weren’t watching something polite or forgettable.
Byrne plays Linda, a mother in a state of constant triage, caring for an unnamed daughter—food-fussy, difficult, often infuriating—who suffers from a mysterious condition requiring a feeding tube. Linda’s life has narrowed to a single obsession: get her daughter to gain weight, get rid of the tube, reclaim some sliver of normalcy. That’s the plan, anyway.
Then the ceiling collapses. Literally. Water, black mold, asbestos—biblical plagues delivered through faulty plumbing. Mother and child are displaced to a grim motel while the husband, conveniently absent on a luxury cruise, calls incessantly to bark instructions, demand progress, and outsource both parenting and home repair to his exhausted wife. Linda is alone, drowning, and being evaluated from all sides.
About ten minutes in, I leaned over and said, “This feels like Uncut Gems.” Not long after, I learned the film was written and directed by Mary Bronstein, who happens to be married to Ronald Bronstein, a longtime Safdie collaborator. That anxious, grinding sense of no escape is not an accident.
Let me be clear about what this movie is not. It is not a Hollywood crowd-pleaser. It is not a Conan O’Brien vehicle—his presence is cold, clipped, and deeply unsettling. It is not a date movie unless you’re looking to test the structural integrity of your relationship. And it is not a tidy parable offering uplifting wisdom about parenting.
This is a horror film. Not the jump-scare kind, but the kind that tightens its grip scene by scene, turning ordinary stress into existential dread. The terror compounds. The center does not hold.
The most devastating moment comes when Linda tells her therapist that she isn’t just a bad parent—she isn’t a parent at all. After years of vigilance and sacrifice, she feels emptied out, reduced to a hollow administrative shell, a being performing motherhood without any remaining sense of self. A nervous breakdown, she implies, would almost be a relief.
After the credits rolled, I thought of a colleague from years ago who once told me about his brother’s family falling apart. Their teenage daughter, diagnosed with bipolar disorder, became violent. Doors were locked at night. Chairs were wedged against door handles. The strain was unrelenting, and eventually the marriage collapsed under it. Love wasn’t enough. Systems intervened. Judgment followed. The family was pulverized.
That is the movie’s deepest horror: when parenting goes bad, it doesn’t fail gently. It metastasizes. Once institutions and experts enter the picture, you’re no longer just a parent—you’re a defendant. Forms multiply. Everyone watches. You second-guess every instinct. The spiral accelerates.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is fearless in refusing to rescue Linda with a neat arc or a redemptive bow. The film respects her too much for that. I was riveted from start to finish, and when it ended, I felt wrung out.
Most of all, my heart broke for Linda. She is not a lesson. She is not a case study. She is a wound. And she will stay with me for a long time.
Cinemorphosis 
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