‘If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,’ Starring a Sensational Rose Byrne, Is a Welcome Shock to Sundance’s System
The walls are closing in on Linda (Rose Byrne), a therapist having the worst week of her life, in Mary Bronstein’s exhilarating anxiety attack of a feature, “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.” And the ceiling is dropping out, too.
In writer/director Bronstein’s second film (2008’s “Yeast”), Byrne gives what will go down as one of the year’s great screen performances, channeling Gena Rowlands in anguished close-up as a therapist whose ailing daughter needs around-the-clock care, whose apartment is flooded to ruin, and whose husband (Christian Slater) is nowhere to be found. This horror movie of motherhood, which premiered at Sundance on Friday afternoon to a packed Library crowd, comes to the festival with A24 already in place as distributor for later this year.
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Were that not the case, buyers would be scrambling. Audiences were wowed and pummeled in equal measure by a film that’s earned comparisons to “Uncut Gems” (another A24 title, and with overlap thanks to Josh Safdie as a producer) as Byrne has a wine- and weed-fueled nervous breakdown for two hours. The most mundane frustrations of the day, from harping parking attendees to her hapless patients, become operatic troubles as Australian “Damages” and “Bridesmaids” breakout Byrne gives a career-crowning turn.
Before the buzzy, standing-room-only screening, Sundance director of programming Kim Yutani all but threw her introductory notes off the dais, while Bronstein urged audiences to forget about whatever they were going through today (and everything the world is going through) to submit themselves to her mad vision. Applause was enthusiastic afterward, but I heard a festivalgoer behind me whisper “dark… disturbing” after the end credits before leaving the theater.
Joining Bronstein after the screening for a Q&A were Byrne and her co-star Conan O’Brien, whom A24 personally called upon to read the script. He plays Linda’s miserable therapist, and said he was surprised Byrne didn’t check herself into a hospital after production. (They had four weeks of intense rehearsals before filming took place on-location in Montauk in late summer 2023.) Bronstein described the theme of the movie and Linda’s driving force as “I need help, I need help, I need help, but please don’t help me.” After her apartment floods and a gaping hole opens up in the ceiling, she’s forced into a hotel with her daughter, who’s hooked up to a machine with a tube in her stomach, a walkie-talkie monitor beeping in Linda’s hands at all times as she careens between therapy appointments and rushes to buy more wine from the check-in desk downstairs. More breakdowns and past-trauma-resurfacing ensue.
“I had a personal experience with my daughter, which I won’t talk about in detail because that’s her story to tell if she ever wants to tell it. I’d never seen a movie before where a mother is going through a crisis with the child, but our energy is not with the child’s struggle, it’s with the mother’s struggle,” said Bronstein, whose film keeps Linda’s daughter (Delaney Quinn) entirely out of frame until the last scene.
Other co-stars include “Patti Cake$” breakout Danielle Macdonald as one of Linda’s patients, one whose motherly anxieties start to eerily resemble those of Andrea Yates, the Texan with postpartum depression sentenced to life in prison in 2002 for drowning her five kids. Vintage news clips of her trial thread throughout. A charmingly funny A$AP Rocky also plays Linda’s neighbor at the hotel, who takes a perverse fascination with this epically floundering working mother.
“It’s about having to function in the world while dealing with deep trauma that you have no time to take out and actually give it,” Bronstein said.
“It was fascinating because she’s in this crisis, and I was like, ‘Who was she before? Who’s that person?’ I was obsessed with that, who [she is] before this trauma. She’s already at the end of the road when we meet her, and it gets even worse and worse,” Byrne said.
O’Brien said, “I’ve spent over 30 years talking to actors and artists. To watch someone of Rose’s caliber do what she does, you see her do it once. I saw her do it 15 times… I don’t know how you did that and not check into a hospital afterwards. I haven’t seen any actor, man or woman, sustain that level for an entire movie. I feel like I have to go to a hospital now because this is the first time I’ve watched it. I’m a mess.”
Expect Byrne to be in the awards conversation for an exhilarating movie that’s a challenging sit, the reason why films are built around an all-timer performance to begin with, and one that’s now the hottest ticket at Sundance. It’s only day two, but “If I Had Legs” just took the defibrillators to Park City.
“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival and will be released by A24 later this year.
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