Mommy Dearest

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You directed by Mary Bronstein. A24 Films, 114 minutes. 2025.

It is axiomatic that the way a mother cares for her children has a lot to do with how they turn out. Take Tony Soprano. Or consider a meme: an image of a pregnant woman smoking and drinking is accompanied by the text “no it doesn’t affect my baby”; a picture of the child follows, and it’s a guy driving a tricked out pickup truck or an internet troll looking at photos of Donald Trump. Psychological problems seem universally understood as having to do with a “bad mother.” What criteria makes a mother bad, however, isn’t always as clear.

This ambiguity may explain why the bad mother archetype has been an object of enduring cultural fascination. As late as the 1970s, psychologists blamed the cold, distant, “refrigerator mother” for children born with autism. Today, the same accusation is lobbed at the pregnant woman who takes Tylenol to ease her pain. Society expects women to be inherently equipped to raise children, a standard that rarely maps onto their actual experience of motherhood.

Linda, the main character of Mary Bronstein’s psychological thriller If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, is a mother who, like many, struggles to fill her prescribed role. The film closely follows Linda’s (Rose Byrne) perspective as she navigates life as a working-class, effectively single parent in Montauk raising a young child whose mysterious, eating-related illness requires near constant care and attention—the first of many problems that will arise. The film has a dark and frenetic energy, and joins a slew of psychological thrillers and dramas that highlight the anxiety and discomfort of growing a human and reckoning with the reality of being its biologically dependent caretaker. These films range from classics like Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968) to more recent streaming bait like John Lee’s False Positive (2021), or international indie knockouts like Alice Diop’s Saint Omer (2022). (One early review of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You compared it, aptly, to Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter.)

But while at points devastating, eerie, and frenzied, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is also a feminist comedy of errors: at every stage of the film, husbands abdicate domestic responsibilities while wives nearly drown under the weight of their burdens. The problems in Linda’s life compound at an absurd rate, all the while her husband works the most stereotypically male job possible: a ship captain. The unequal division of domestic labor on display is not surprising; what makes the film’s depiction singular is the way it creates a viewing experience that actually simulates the texture of the fallible mother’s experience. Few motherhood movies of this genre are so wholly dedicated to interpolating viewers into the mother’s overwhelm. In employing this strategy, Bronstein encourages us not to simply look at and evaluate the struggling mother’s behavior, but to feel her pain as we do so.

We know that Linda has some things to work on from the film’s first frame. During a family therapy session, her daughter, whose face stays hidden for the majority of the movie, tells their therapist that her mom is “stretchable,” “like putty,” especially when she’s sad. Linda denies the claim to her daughter and the therapist, leading the therapist to suggest they have a session on their own. After these familial dynamics are introduced, material problems unfold: water comes rushing through a hole in their ceiling, flooding their rented apartment while the panic-prone child asks if they are going to die. Forced to move into a seedy motel while her husband is away, Linda attempts to balance her days calling contractors and landlords, working a taxing job as a psychotherapist, making sessions with her own shrink who works down the hall, and dropping her daughter off at a care facility with a tyrannical parking attendant and a demanding physician, Dr. Spring (played by Bronstein herself). At night, Linda’s sleep is interrupted by the incessant beeping of her child’s feeding machine, which she fills with a bevy of crushed pills and liquids that nourish her through a tube. Tattered and depleted, Linda relieves herself like a moody teen: with pocket tunes, weed, and wine. Amid it all, her husband reassures her over the phone that “the sky is not falling.”

But it is, literally. As Linda struggles to manage her domestic and professional labors, the film keeps circling back to the hole in her ceiling. Every so often, she returns to the apartment to send a picture of it to her husband or get some time to herself. One evening, after smoking weed and watching Flesh–Eating Mothers (1988), a movie about exactly what it sounds like, Linda hears a crash in the bedroom. She runs in to find that not only has the hole expanded; it’s also oozing with goop and glimmering with light. As she stares up into the chasm, beams begin to flicker and the film flashes back to a memory from a traumatic experience in a hospital with her daughter. The psychological part of the thriller takes hold; we’re not sure what’s real and what’s hallucinated. How high is Linda, really?

Later, when she tells her husband that the hole has gotten bigger, he asks if she means the hole in their child’s stomach where the feeding tube enters. This is not the hole she’s referring to, but it’s a productive misunderstanding that is deliberately inserted into the dialogue. Linda’s daughter isn’t improving either—she’s failing to reach the goal weight Dr. Spring has set for her, which would allow the feeding tube to come out and for her child to return to school. As these stressors compound, the two holes become one: an omnipresent symbol of Linda’s struggle; a menacing inscrutability and refusal to be contained.

Linda not only struggles to disentangle these problems but also has difficulty reflecting on how they impact her behavior. As a filmmaker and actress, Mary Bronstein has always been attuned to how one’s lack of self-awareness can affect close relationships. We see it in her mumblecore inaugural, Yeast (2008), where, alongside Greta Gerwig, Bronstein stars as a teacher named Rachel who can’t sense how her own controlling and critical tendencies play a role in the deterioration of her friendships. But If I Had Legs attains a new level of interior complexity, not because of the movie’s more sophisticated production—though at the film’s Sundance premiere this year, Bronstein nearly burst into tears when she discussed what it was like to finally get real funding for her work—but rather because it dials into the idiosyncrasies of the maternal relationship with the child and the world.

Despite this seriousness, the film is also, crucially, funny. Part of its sense of humor comes from the fact Linda, who lacks insight into her own faults, is a professional interpreter of the emotions and behaviors of others. Freudian tropes abound: Linda is, at least subconsciously, devoted to her therapist (Conan O’Brien), whom she relies on heavily in the absence of her own husband. In one session, she gets mad at him for failing to bring up an email she sent him in the middle of the night, in which she describes a fantasy of the two of them flirting in the presence of her husband. He says he doesn’t reply to his clients’ dream emails, and she is offended. Her position as both therapist and patient should give her insight into the phenomenon of transference, and yet when her own young male patient Stephen (Daniel Zolghadri) says he had a dream in which Linda kissed him, she is bewildered and has no grounding theory to offer.

Linda’s hypocrisy is less comical when it comes to her patient Caroline (Danielle Macdonald). Caroline is distrusting and paranoid, sensing discomfort in her newborn when, really, she just has her own anxieties around mothering. This projection scares Linda, who is unable to consciously empathize despite having a child of her own. When Caroline says that she thought Linda might understand, as a mother herself, she seems surprised. 

It’s this relationship with Caroline that nearly pushes Linda over the edge. During one session, in which the therapist recommends that her patient consider going on psychiatric medication, Caroline accuses her of trying to hurt her baby, who she brings to each session. She asks if she can go to the bathroom, and never returns, leaving Linda with a crying infant on top of all that is already collapsing. When Linda eventually turns the baby over to the police, the officer tells her that mothers abandoning their babies just to catch a break is more common than one might think. Bronstein is dropping hints everywhere of a reality that Linda is only starting to be able to verbalize: that sometimes mothers simply cannot do it all on their own.

Toward the end of the film, Linda reveals her dark thoughts—thoughts she knows she’s not supposed to have. She tells her therapist that years before she had her current child, she was pregnant with another baby that she aborted. Sometimes she wonders if she got rid of the wrong child, she says. Hollowed out, empty, and on the verge of catastrophe, she wonders whether she was ever cut out to be a mother at all.

By this point, Dr. Spring has threatened to kick Linda’s daughter out of treatment due to her delinquency in family therapy and her explosion in a group session: when Spring tells a room full of grieving mothers that their children’s afflictions are not their fault, Linda proclaims that she’s lying. Back at the motel, Linda pulls out her daughter’s feeding tube in a scene that feels never ending; a magician pulling a chain of scarves from his pocket. She knows this is dangerous, but is too fed up with her own exhaustion to think twice. When her husband finally returns and sees what she’s done, Linda takes cues from Caroline. She runs out onto the beach and out into the ocean, and throws herself into the waves’ abyss. Linda has not only reached her breaking point, but her worst fears have also been confirmed: she has behaved like a bad mother.

Bronstein’s objective is not to pass judgement on the mother but to underline her guilt in a society designed for her to fail. In the film’s final frame, we see Linda’s daughter’s face for the first time. She’s staring down at her mother, who is staring back at her, reassuring the freckled child that mommy will “be better.” But be better at what? Certainly, Linda can work on bettering herself: she can address her neuroses, admit to her defensiveness, and acknowledge how those characteristics have contributed to her child’s own suffering. But she can’t fix the conditions that have pushed her there. What Dr. Spring said, while delivered glibly, had a grain of truth: it’s not all the fault of the mother, despite our overwhelming desire to place the blame on her. If Bronstein’s goal with this film is to put you in Linda’s shoes, by the time you’ve been through it, your choice will be clear: to throw them off as soon as possible and run away barefoot.