By Jason Osiason

Mary Bronstein doesn’t just direct If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, she traps you inside it. The film suffocates, unsettles, and drags you deep into the slow-motion breakdown of a woman who has nothing left to give but is forced to keep going anyway. Rose Byrne is extraordinary, delivering a performance so raw it feels invasive to watch. This isn’t just maternal burnout; it’s something uglier, more all-consuming. She plays Linda like a woman whose body is still moving but whose mind is already somewhere else, circling the drain of exhaustion, grief, and quiet, gnawing terror. Fellow Byrne heads, this is the performance.

The story is deceptively simple. Linda is a therapist whose life has been slipping through her fingers for years. Her daughter is sick, though no doctor can tell her why. Her husband is absent in every way that matters. Then, after their home literally collapses, she and her daughter are forced to move into a decaying motel, the kind of place where time warps and the air is thick with something unspeakable. Days blend together. The walls feel closer. Conversations don’t line up. People slip in and out of her orbit, sometimes familiar, sometimes strangers. The film never announces itself as a psychological horror, but it doesn’t need to. The horror is already there, lurking in the mundanity, pressing down like a weight she can’t shake.

Byrne’s performance is a masterclass in barely contained dread. She doesn’t rely on breakdowns or loud, performative despair as she lets Linda rot from the inside out. Her voice is just a little too calm when she reassures her daughter. Her smile lingers too long, stretching into something unnatural. There’s a moment, late in the film, where she simply stares at herself in a bathroom mirror, and it lasts so long, with so little movement, that it becomes unbearable to watch. Every second of this film pulses with unease, like something is about to snap, but the moment never comes.

Bronstein films everything with a kind of sickly stillness. The motel feels liminal, like a place where nothing real happens but time continues passing anyway. The camera lingers on the mundane in an empty hallway, a plate of uneaten food, a damp towel on a bathroom floor—turning them into something deeply sinister. The editing fractures reality just enough to unnerve. Scenes repeat in slight variations, dialogue loops with different intonations, objects disappear and reappear in places they don’t belong. It’s not flashy, but it’s deeply, deeply wrong, and that’s what makes it so terrifying.

The supporting cast is small but eerily precise. Conan O’Brien, playing Linda’s therapist, is both detached and vaguely menacing, delivering advice that feels more like a dare. A$AP Rocky, in a surprisingly effective dramatic turn, plays James, a fellow motel resident whose presence flickers between comforting and uncanny. Their interactions feel real until they don’t, until they shift slightly in ways you can’t immediately place.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You doesn’t just depict burnout as it forces you to sit inside it, to feel the crushing, looping, inescapable exhaustion of a woman who has lost her grip on reality but has no choice but to keep moving. It’s unrelenting, discomforting, and refuses to let you breathe. Byrne is staggering, Bronstein directs like she’s peeling back a layer of something rotten, and the entire film plays like a prolonged fever dream you can’t wake up from. One of the most disturbing, suffocating, and eerily hypnotic films of the year. [A-]