A minor masterpiece of stress, shame, and the feeling that reality is beginning to warp.
The way Rose Byrne is shot and edited in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You makes her feel like an uncredited fifth character in Requiem for a Dream. If she were in that movie, audiences would be asking where her drugs are—but here, she needs none. Her mental illness behaves like a drug anyway, distorting time and flattening reality. She sees a therapist, though she is one herself. It makes you wonder: is this what my therapist is like when they’re not talking to me?
Linda’s life collapses quite literally when a hole opens in her apartment ceiling—possibly from flooding, faulty plumbing, or maybe an alien in the walls. The film never clarifies, because Linda can’t. Her grip on cause and effect is slipping. At the same time, she is responsible for caring for her daughter, who can technically eat but refuses food because it feels “squishy,” and who is graded daily on how much she consumes. The entire household revolves around a single goal: getting her weight up to fifty pounds. Linda is never alone, yet utterly abandoned.
Byrne carries the entire film, delivering a performance built on quiet humiliation and sustained dread. Linda isn’t heroic or admirable; she’s exhausted, brittle, and increasingly convinced she is failing at everything she is supposed to do well. Everyone else feels like a walk-on cameo. Conan O’Brien actually acts, briefly, and his presence reminded me of Dylan Baker in Requiem for a Dream: when someone is unraveling, the most others will do for them is ask a few questions and then discreetly step away.
For a first feature, director Mary Bronstein shows impressive control. This could easily have been an amateurish mess—a pile of anxiety with no shape—but instead it becomes a low-budget, quietly devastating minor masterpiece. Byrne somehow landed a role most actresses would have killed for, had they known what Bronstein was after. Onscreen, it feels uncomfortably familiar.
This is what I felt like during COVID.
8/10
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