'If I Had Legs I'd Kick You' Should Come with a Trigger Warning for Parents

The Rose Byrne performance in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is exactly as advertised. We have talked about this before, but we really do not celebrate Byrne enough. She moves effortlessly between family films (Instant Family, Spirited, Peter Rabbit), horror (the Insidious franchise), cameos (The Boys), voice work (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Bluey), action fare (X-Men), comedies (Platonic, Neighbors), and formidable dramatic television turns (Mrs. America, Damages).

In If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, she may deliver the best performance of her career as a mother drowning in stress. It is a good movie as well, written and directed by Mary Bronstein. It is just not an easy one to watch. The anxiety that consumes Byrne’s character, Linda, is so recognizable that it becomes oppressive, almost inescapable.

Linda has a young daughter, around seven or eight, who has an eating disorder related to food texture and taste and relies on a feeding tube at night to maintain her weight. Linda’s husband, played by Christian Slater, works on a cruise ship and is gone for eight weeks at a time, leaving her to manage their daughter’s care alone. She is desperately trying to get her daughter to gain enough weight to remove the tube and return to school.

Then a pipe bursts in their apartment, flooding it and forcing Linda and her daughter to live out of a motel for weeks. Linda is also a therapist and is already overwhelmed by her patients’ problems. One woman with severe postpartum depression even flees Linda’s office, leaving her crying infant behind in Linda’s care. Linda can barely manage her own life, much less the lives of others, and it does not help that her own therapist, played with surprising effectiveness by Conan O’Brien, seems to actively dislike her. Meanwhile, her daughter’s therapist demands even more of Linda’s attention and tries to reassure her that the eating disorder is not her fault. Linda is convinced that it is.

Notably, we do not see Linda’s daughter’s face. She exists only as a voice that whines, cries, demands, and melts down. The same is true of Linda’s husband, who appears as a disembodied voice on the phone that nags, pressures, and judges. Linda is completely submerged in stress. She turns to marijuana and alcohol at night just to cope, but cannot sleep, which only compounds everything.

Linda is drowning, and because Rose Byrne’s performance is so precise, we feel every second of it. The film plays like psychological torture, like being handed a 30-page to-do list and being told it all must be finished immediately, or the worst imaginable consequences will follow. She has no real support system. The two people at the center of her life, her daughter and her husband, are bottomless wells of need, as are her patients, some of whom develop unhealthy attachments. Even her therapist offers little more than apathy and hostility.

Parents of young children understand this kind of exhaustion. Parenting is an endless series of decisions. Just figuring out what to eat three times a day, every single day, is taxing enough. Add a child with an eating disorder who will not eat, weeks spent living out of a motel, and the hundreds of small but consequential choices Linda must make daily. What Linda wants most is for someone to simply tell her what to do. She is desperate for life to return to normal, even though normal is often a fantasy for parents of young kids.

Honestly, the movie is too much. It left me anxious and wound tight, like watching a show about hoarders, except everything being hoarded is emotional and there is no cleanup crew waiting at the end. You just live with it. Every day. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is essentially Requiem for a Dream for parenting. It is very much not chill. It probably should come with a trigger warning for parents. That said, good god, Rose Byrne is phenomenal.

‘If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’ is available for purchase or rent in all the usual digital places.