Telluride ’25: If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

****/****
starring Rose Byrne, Conan O’Brien, Danielle Macdonald, A$AP Rocky
written and directed by Mary Bronstein

by Walter Chaw Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is brutal.

It’s uncompromising in the best way–merciless–and though I’m hardly the ideal person to unpack this aspect of it, it seems to aspire, honest and true, towards Laura Mulvey’s dream of a female gaze-driven cinema. It’s a film I can see Chantal Akerman having made, in other words: a horror movie about expectations for women in a culture that pathologically devalues women. The film avoids much of the standard wisdom when it comes to building suture between its characters and the audience. It finds the notion of politesse revolting. It willfully repulses attachment to it. Like its hero, it abhors attempts at succour. Succour is insincere and cloying. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You explicitly punishes empathy, hostile to the notion that platitudes have any usefulness in solving problems. Ever. The expectation to put a happy face on the unbearable heaviness of being is shown to be performative, as hollow as all of our coping strategies, from therapy to self-medication to denial to support groups, are hollow. Each cure a different intensity of placebo treating symptoms rather than syndromes. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You doesn’t have answers. As the title implies, it doesn’t even have the energy to pose proper questions. Who has time to articulate the experience of despair? Who has time to construct legible borders around maelstrom and chaos?

Linda (Rose Byrne) has a tween daughter (Delaney Quinn) who’s gravely ill. If she doesn’t gain two pounds in a week–just two fucking pounds, the unctuous Dr. Spring (Bronstein) implies–Linda could lose custody of her. So, every night, Linda hooks her kid up to a feeding machine attached to the feeding tube punched into the kid’s stomach, and wakes up every few hours to refill it with the gunk that’s keeping her alive. That is, if Linda ever gets any sleep, which she tends not to do, kept awake by a mixture of wine, pot, the steady beep of the machine, and stress. Always stress. See, Linda has to live in a motel because the ceiling in her apartment has sprung a giant hole, and she has to take care of her sick kid while doing her full-time therapist job because her husband (Christian Slater) is on week three of an eight-week work trip. Linda has a therapist (Conan O’Brien) whose carefulness to maintain a professional distance from Linda makes Linda furious. She’s also a therapist with a patient of her own, Caroline (Danielle MacDonald), who is so obsessed with keeping her infant son safe that it becomes clear to Linda she’s probably going to kill him. “Don’t you understand?” Caroline asks Linda. “I thought you understood.” Linda might understand, but it’s not her job as a therapist to provide answers. When she tries, boy, does she fuck things up.

Linda’s motel is presided over by a bored, capricious front desk goth nightmare (Ivy Wolk) who derives some pleasure in fucking with Linda. The parking attendant (Mark Stolzenberg) at her kid’s clinic has a beef with her, too. Linda’s awful, whiny, terrified kid wants a hamster. Linda is in Hell, and a lot of it is her fault. (Dr. Spring becomes the film’s chief villain, if only because she keeps asking Linda to schedule an appointment to talk about the health of Linda’s child.) She’s prickly, worn threadbare by a constant parade of “adulting” problems that cause her to snap at people doing their best to pretend everything is fine. Linda doesn’t want to pretend. Late at night, armed with a baby monitor and her pathetic collection of petty vices, she sometimes visits her empty apartment to gaze at the hole in her ceiling. In her delirium, her exhaustion and sleeplessness, the hole appears in her mind to be evolving from splintered, water-damaged wood into an organic aperture. It’s at once bizarre and disturbingly familiar in the way a cloaca might be. Cronenbergian. Like the hole in her daughter’s stomach. Like the hole left in Linda’s life when her mom died. She starts seeing things glittering in the hole. The hole begins seeing things in her.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You shoots Linda in extreme close-up for the bulk of its first half so assiduously that I caught myself craning to see past her. The physical experience of watching the film is fascinatingly awful. Byrne is one of the cinema’s great beauties, of course, but nothing is “good” for long when you’re a centimetre away from it. I suspect this is at least part of the point. Bronstein exacerbates the “badness” of that proximity by having Linda disconsolately shoving entire slices of pizza in her mouth and chewing, ruminating, for what seems like hours. For her, she’s constantly eating something just for that brief rush of endorphins–just to be in control of a moment of her pain, maybe. For us? It’s difficult to watch. You want to click at her like you would your dog for licking his leg too long.

Bronstein is invested in your discomfort. What Linda is going through shouldn’t feel good. It shouldn’t gratify your prurience. Neither should it demean Linda’s dignity with your automatic sympathy. The picture walks a very fine line between our appreciation of how difficult and “unfair” Linda’s trials are and how unlikable Linda is according to our expectations of what women should suffer in order to be upstanding in the eyes of those who judge them and find them perpetually wanting. Her frequent, desperate conversations with her absent husband have us angry with him for his absence, but doesn’t a part of us agree with him that Linda should suck it up and endure the mom’s group set up to help families in similar straits? What’s wrong with us?

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You covers a lot of ground. The lack of a social safety net, the need for mental-health care (and the futility of it sometimes), the need for affordable housing. It’s a condemnation of landlords, even a consideration of modern race relations in the casting of rapper A$AP Rocky as a good-natured neighbour at Linda’s motel who gets sucked into her drama, at first willingly but quickly against his efforts to escape. There is no escape. The film covers a lot of bases, but it’s really about how you can’t get away from your responsibilities. How the things you do in your past will always haunt you. How, no matter how hard you try, there is no way around, only through. It’s one damned thing after another.

I love a throwaway moment where, half-asleep and high, Linda watches the possessed-cannibal-baby portion of Demons 2 and asks Siri what the fuck is on the television. All of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a variety of fever hallucination. Life is a fever hallucination, an abomination of endless night punctuated now and then by bolts of kindness and grace so crystalline and shocking it’s like being punched through the heart with a hypodermic needle filled with ice. Life is other people, and other people are hell. Even if those other people are your family. Especially when they are. There’s no one looking out for you who can do anything to help you. You’re essentially on your own. This movie left me anxious and miserable, and also exhilarated and seen. Good luck out there. Thoughts and prayers.