If I Had Legs I’d Kick You Review – Rose Byrne is a knockout in anxious dark comedy | Sundance 2025

L.Ast years of toothless adaptation of Rachel Yoders NightbitchIt had a premiere and then disappeared during autumn festivals, tried to bring attention to the specific hell of motherhood. But valid pointers were clumsy underlined, highlighted and surrounded by a hard hand, a missed option that has now been pushed even further in the shade of Mary Bronstein’s superior Sundance offering, the appropriate aggressively sounding if in had legs i’d kick You.

It is a far darker film (A24 VS Disney), but it focuses on a similarly exhausted mother, exhausted not only by childcare, but from the total lack of awareness and help of them in her life. She is played here by Rose Byrne, a person who has long deserved something more important to put her teeth in, a talented cartoonist who has found herself a little lost in ungrateful franchises and somewhat seen Apple shows. She has come across an unlikely savior in author-director Bronstein, whose debut Mumble Mumble Comedy Yeast was released back in 2008 and has now returned with a movie that shares a similar anxious energy but for an older, more superficial mature crowd.

While Byrnes Linda is a wife, mother and therapist, she often wants her to just smoke hash and drink wine alone instead. The more we see from her life it is not difficult to understand why. Her husband (Christian Slater) is never at home, on long work trips, but in regular, rubbing contact, where he judged on the phone with a deafening volume. Her job involves talking to patients that she struggles to help while her real therapist and colleague (Conan O’Brien) is losing patience with her. Then her daughter, who is shown off the screen, suffers, yet heard via an almost constant whining, from a mysterious disease involving a refusal to eat. Then there is the gigantic hole in her apartment that forces her to move to a rough motel, cursed with a disgusting receptionist (Ivy Wolk) and blessed with a friendly stone (a charismatic a $ AP Rocky).

From the opening scenes that focus tightly on Byrne’s upset face, Bronstein aims to keep us rattling and on the edge with Linda. Produced by Josh Safdie and Bronstein’s husband and Safdie partner Ronald Bronstein, bears the same feeling of constant anxiety, something that can be effectively suffocating, but sometimes too exhausting. Unlike Nightbitch, who softly tapped the idea that having a child in itself is an infinite nightmare before he essentially ends things with a group hug, Bronstein is pushing far harder and framing motherhood as a often joyless And for some completely inappropriate life choices. One of Linda’s patients (Danielle MacDonald) talks about the all -consuming need to protect her baby, but also about what she sees when she looks at him, an empty, needy creature that requires so much but gives little in return . Linda’s daughter’s total, crazy headache – needy, nagging, impossible to please – is never offset by any real warmth, just the inevitable feeling of failure. Bronstein’s manuscript can sometimes be a little too guard and reluctant, but she gives Byrne a prominent scene with her and O’Brien as she admits a truth that most parents would be too scared to ever admit.

It is a deliberately unpleasant endurance test of a film (in his intro on Sundance, Bronstein called the “experienced”), a downward spiral playing with glimpses of surrealism that often dives into moments of full horror, of which parts work more than others . It is sometimes reminiscent of one of the A24’s Sundance offerings from last year, the feverishly unpleasant a different man, but it does not possess the same deterrent and quite young viciousness. Linda is a tough protagonist whose decisions can frustrate, but the movie keeps you next to, desperate after she has to sleep throughout the night or just have someone offering to help. It may focus on the increased stress that being a mother entails, but there is a recognizable prayer for many who have felt alone and insecure as Linda asks her therapist to tell her what to do. How do I solve this? What do I do with it? When will it get better?

What really keeps us on the side is an absolutely sensational Byrne, forced with his head first through the twist in the type of exciting, all-in-show case she just hasn’t been abandoned until now. She reaches the highest levels of frustration and anger without falling back on light histrionics, a whirlwind of nerves and sadness that is eager for someone to understand. It could lead to something of a career focal point, the kind of commendable work that should inspire other risk -averting directors to work with her next time.

In just under two hours with a plate filled a little too high, not everything here works as well as Byrne, but Bronstein has obviously not made anything that likes she has done something to experience. I can’t say I easily forget that experience.