OSCARS 2026: If I Had Legs I'd Kick You (2025)

In 2012, Kier-La Janisse published "House of Psychotic Women." The style of film the book covered had existed since at least 1928's "The Wind" but Janisse's "autobiographical topography of female neurosis in horror and exploitation films" helped put a label on a subgenre of melodrama and psychological horror that had previously been unclassified. It's a very hip style of film, as the influence of "Persona," "Possession," and "Fire Walk With Me" grows ever more apparent. Should Janisse ever publish an updated edition or sequel to her most discussed book, it would surely mention "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You." The latest from filmmaker Mary Bronstein, it represents the taste makers at A24 tricking the Academy into watching something weird and abrasive. While it scored no other nominations, Rose Bryne does seem to be the popular second place choice for Best Actress as of this writing. 

Linda is having a hard time. Her daughter has a medical condition that necessitates a feeding tube. This means Linda must drive her to appointments every day and pour nutritional powder into a machine every night. If the kid can gain fifty pounds, the tube can be removed but Linda's child is a very picky eater. Her husband is an officer in the Navy and currently at sea. Upon returning home one day, she discovers a leak in the ceiling... Which quickly turns into a downpour, a massive hole erupting through the house. Linda and her kid move into a sketchy hotel while the repairs drag on. All the while, she continues to go to her day job: Therapist to women in crisis and horny teenage boys. Her own therapist seems increasingly antagonistic to her. Unable to sleep, Linda engages in riskier behavior. Such as drinking, buying drugs, sneaking into her old home, leaving her daughter unattended for long stretches of time. As the endless stresses pile up, the line between dreams, nightmares, visions, and reality blur.

After checking into the hotel they'll be spending the rest of the movie in, Linda is awoken by her daughter's feeding tube machine beeping in the middle of the night. This is opposed to the regular beeping the machine makes when it's working correctly. Whenever she ventures out of the hotel room at night and leaves her daughter behind, she carries a baby monitor with her so she can still hear the beeping. That low level of worry, of frustration, of annoyance, is always present. “If I Had Legs” is basically a cinematic panic attack, which is accomplished by adding ever more disturbances and concerns onto its heroine's head. She can't sit in her car outside the clinic without a man tapping on her window, telling her she can't park here. She can't get a bottle of wine because it's past 2AM. When she arrives early to buy the same wine, she is told she needs her I.D. Her daughter's voice, almost always petulant and needy and demanding, is usually heard crying off-screen as well. Her patients bother her at work and at home. It's never ending for Linda. She has no peace, no quiet. The explosive flood of water into her home in the opening act is not a climax of her worries overflowing. It's the beginning of a chain reaction of bothers that do not cease. 

It is, in other words, the life of a mother. The hole that burst through Linda's ceiling in the first act is an image the movie returns to repeatedly. The opening is yonic in appearance but also recalls both a gaping wound. Not unlike the hole in her daughter's stomach. Throughout her nightmares, the opening begins to resembles both a circle and an ovum about to be fertilized. And if you're standing in the middle of a circle, what is it besides a prison? During a meeting with her daughter's doctor, Linda goes on a largely incoherent rant about how everything is the mother's fault. She sees footage on a TV of a woman eating a baby in a horror movie. Her most desperate patient ends up abandoning her screaming infant child at Linda's office. When she contacts the child's father, he berates her. Being a mom doesn't only mean constantly being needed and being relied upon, it also means that any time something goes wrong, you are to blame.

It's not as if the men in her life are any help at all. Her husband – played by a special guest star that made me point at the screen like in the Leo DiCaprio meme – is rarely anything more than a chastising voice on the phone. In one pointed moment, he's at a baseball game while on the phone with her. He gets a break. Her perpetually annoyed therapist is played by Conan O'Brien, his ability to translate bemusement with only a look finding an extremely suitable use here. She tries to enter his office during an emergency and he repeatedly tells her to leave, fighting over the gap in the door like the tips of their shoes are sabers. Finally, once he's had enough, he simply says this isn't working and gets up and leave. When you're a man, you can do that. The father of the abandoned child demands Linda drop everything and bring his baby to him, because he's busy right now. Guys can leave whenever they want but motherhood is forever. 

In the beginning, Linda being a therapist is a sick joke of sorts. She has all these problems in her life pushing her to the absolute edge... And her job is to listen to other people bitch about their issues. What makes her job even more humiliating is that she does genuinely care about her patients. Caroline is the woman who, in the midst of a nervous breakdown, drops her kid at Linda's office. She is worried about Caroline, trying to contact her, genuinely hoping to help her. Much the same way she cares about her daughter – always off-screen, only her hands or feet seen – despite being forever stressed about her. Being a therapist is a commitment to care about your patient. The same way being a mother is a commitment to care about your child. It's a relief to someone else but a burden to you, no matter how sincere you are. 

All of which is to say that “If I Had Legs I'd Kick You” is an utterly nightmarish cinematic experience. Christopher Messina's cinematography is excellent at making mundane spaces, like the hallway of Linda's office or a beach at night, look uncanny. At a certain point, I began to wonder how much of what Linda was experiencing was a nightmare or her increasingly strange waking reality. The film does not give us the catharsis of confirming one or another. This is a another way it makes us feel trapped in this hell world with its protagonist. Rose Bryne is excellent at conveying how Linda is always only barely pushing back the tide of emotions overwhelming her at all times. Honestly, as someone who does regularly deal with actual panic attacks, I found the film to hit a little too close to home. The most grotesque and unsettling scenes – an escalation of minor horrors involving a pet hamster, that opening deluge, the tidal finale – had me straining the muscles in my jaw from grimacing so hard. 

I would sum the picture up as for the folks who thought “We Need to Talk About Kevin” was too cuddly and light-hearted. Though it features no ghosts or ghouls or hatchet murders – though a little bit of bodily mutation before the end – it is absolutely a horror movie. Like any modern horror story, it features a final scare right before the credits too. In this case, it is the suggestion that Linda's madness is sure to be passed onto her daughter, the same way her mother passed it on to her. That's what I think the vague title means, by the way. A baby is known to kick its mother from within the womb, the beginning of a child putting pressure on its parents. But the young daughter's future offspring hasn't developed legs yet. But it will and it'll kick her too, when the time comes. File this one under one of those films I must admit is extremely well made and thoughtfully created in many ways that I have no interest in ever watching again. [7/10]