"If I Had Legs I'd Kick You" hits brutally hard if you grow up in a dysfunctional family, live with a silent chronic illness, or know the desperation of needing help that simply never arrives.
You keep moving through life with a weight that grinds you down piece by piece-slowly and in a degrading, invisible way.
It lives inside you, eating you alive, yet you're still expected to be the strong one for everyone else: listening, supporting, holding them together while you feel hollowed out, with anxiety as your only loyal companion.
It's a condition almost impossible to grasp unless you've lived it for a prolonged time, and "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You" captures it-right from its brilliantly subtle title-with astonishing accuracy.
It transforms the everyday workings of a collapsing mind into something both magnificently rendered and deeply unsettling, precisely because it feels so real.
Director Mary Bronstein, through an exceptional, skin-stripping performance from Rose Byrne as Linda, takes us on one of the most extreme and agonising cinematic journeys of the year.
The official plot tells us Linda is juggling her daughter's mysterious illness, an absent husband, a missing person, and a therapist who grows increasingly hostile.
But that description reduces something far more complex-and, honestly, difficult for me to summarise. These plot points aren't the story; they're pressure points, mirrors an internal psychological collapse that feels both intimate and volcanic.
The film hit me in a way very few do, it dredged up every burden I'm currently dragging behind me.
It resonated so deeply I found myself wishing someone were there to understand it with me, to hold my hand through it.
Its deliberate emotional architecture left me feeling its stress, exhaustion, empathy fatigue, and the kind of claustrophobic panic you simply can't ignore.
Bronstein leans heavily on stark, wordless close-ups that make even the smallest daily task feel crushing. The sound design turns Linda's anxiety into something almost physical-an unseen creature pacing just behind her.
Life isn't a fairytale. We're expected to keep functioning, keep producing, keep smiling, and never fail-but that relentlessness fractures the mind. Sanity becomes something you defend with tooth and nail.
Showing up at work, pretending everything is fine, performing normality: these become barricades you're desperate to vault over.
And you do eventually break, because this world isn't gentle-and even kindness is often misread as a threat. Take the motel neighbour James (A$AP Rocky), whose well-meaning attempts to connect only intensify Linda's unraveling.
Linda's environment reflects the stigma around mental illness-the inadequacy of institutions, the exhaustion of those meant to help-embodied perfectly by her unnamed therapist (a brilliant Conan O'Brien), whose detachment borders on cruel.
"If I Had Legs I'd Kick You" is a draining experience. I absolutely recommend it, but as someone who lives with many of the symptoms and emotional states depicted, I'd urge viewers to approach with care.
This film is an emotional rollercoaster-and it doesn't offer safety bars.
