Editor’s Note: Vanyaland Film Editor Nick Johnston is once again out in Park City, Utah, covering the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Check out our preview of the 2025 festival; keep it locked to our full coverage of Sundance reviews from this year’s festival as they go live, and check out our full archives of past editions.
One can spend hours debating A24’s main contribution to cinema. Some people might cite how they reinvented and refined branded swag into a boutique fashion statement, others might mention their nurturing of “elevated” horror through choice curation, and a few might say that they filled the risk-taking niche that other like-minded distributors and producers began to avoid in the ’10s. If you ask me, it’s that they’ve established existential anxiety — not fear — as one of the main feelings their movies impart. Looking at their filmography, it’s absolutely stacked with variations on an anxious theme: Uncut Gems, Climax, Under the Skin, Beau is Afraid and so on and so forth, a feeling that transcends genre or specifics. This is an exceptionally relevant notion — most, if not all, are about control in a chaotic and unpredictable universe — and they haven’t run out of ore, as tapped as the mine may be. As funny as it is, Mary Bronstein‘s If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You is likely to make any normal viewer’s fingers curl into their sweaty palms with sheer panic and dread, with the rawness of its protagonist’s panic spiral — seemingly confirmed by each subsequent disaster that follows her through a few weeks of hell.
Bronstein is a mumblecore vet whose first feature, Yeast, premiered all the way back when Greta Gerwig was still acting in movies shot on MiniDV tape and Williamsburg rents weren’t totally fucking crazy. What’s remarkable is that, unlike some of her peers (the Duplasses, Joe Swanberg, etc.), she’s been able to make the leap to full-featured, mid-budget indie cinema without wholly abandoning the sensibility that made that movement such counter-cultural novelty during the height of its relevance. Part of what makes Legs so goddamn effective as a work of anxious cinema are the tight close-ups that comprise most of the movie’s shots.
When we first see Linda (Rose Byrne), she’s in the middle of a family therapy consult with her daughter’s doctor, and her exhausted face slowly consumes the frame as she’s prodded into admitting that she is sad in a deep way, as much as she refuses to admit it. She starts to cry, and everyone gets upset, further reinforcing her need to be stoic as she takes on her daughter’s mystery illness. The girl’s underweight, getting nutrients pumped from a machine into a stomach port, and she doesn’t seem to be getting better. Her doctor wants her to gain a seemingly impossible amount of weight in a short time, and Linda has no clue what to do — her husband, a boat captain, is merely a resentful voice emanating from her iPhone’s speaker when he’s at sea, and her therapist (Conan O’Brien) is being bizarrely confrontational. Things are rough, sure, but they get even worse once a giant gaping hole opens up in her apartment’s ceiling.
This forces the two of them out of their home and into a shitty Newark motel, where the little frustrations, inconveniences and truly bizarre situations begin to mount at an even more aggressive pace than before. The parking attendant at her daughter’s hospital is getting fiercer and fiercer. The motel’s super, James (A$AP Rocky), seems friendly enough, but she’s skeptical of him: Skeptical of his kindness, his knowledge of mind-silencing breathing techniques, and his ability to get drugs off of the dark web. Then there’s a young woman that Linda knows abandons her child, terrified she’s going to be an Andrea Yates-style family annihilator. Then there’s her nine-year-old daughter (who remains off screen for most of the film) who has two or three modes: Intense neediness, screaming, and demanding things from her mom. She wants a hamster, and somehow even that gets fucked up (in a cringe-worthy yet hilarious fashion).
Relief seems like a fantasy: Any good sleep she gets is interrupted by the beeping of the feeding machine, which always seems to need her attention. She can’t leave the motel room unless she has a baby monitor with her — which is a strange combo when she’s trying to light up a one-hitter and slam some wine in the one secluded spot behind the motel. And, on top of all of this, she still has to go to work every day (and though you’ll probably get spoiled as to what Linda does for a living by some other review, I’m not going to be the one to ruin that belly-laugh for you).
Watching Laura’s nerves slowly start to fray under all of this pressure — and the numerous ways in which it erupts — is engrossing and involving thanks to how Bronstein and Byrne play off of one another. To say this is the best work of Byrne’s career feels both unfair to her excellent performances as a comedian throughout the ‘10s but also kind of an understatement. It isn’t transformative for her in the kind of way that Howie Ratner was for the Sandman, but her skills as an actor are just perfectly suited for this movie, as if it had always been in her filmography: It’s just that natural of a fit.
Linda can be repugnant and shitty, of course, but she never stops being deeply empathetic: Her cosmic loneliness is only amplified by the responsibilities she bears, one that anyone who has ever been a caregiver can understand in a deeply personal way. Byrne is really fantastic at masking complex emotions under a veneer of sunniness or stoicism, doing her best to put on a brave face until things get silly enough that even the most-stiff upper lips would fall into astonishment. There’s shades of the great collapse-performances here, specifically Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence, with the naturalism and theatrics in that portrayal dancing cross-time with Byrne.
This perspective into the myopic panic-spiral is what I appreciate so much about If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You — it feels so accurate to lived experience, as ridiculous as it often can be, that it’s hard to quantify. There’s an fitting relationship between pattern recognition and confirmation bias that takes hold when you’re in the grip of miserable luck, where you can’t imagine things getting better and everything around seems to be doing its best to prove to you that you’re right. Like Linda, you try to place the blame on something concrete —that guy’s an asshole, that was an accident, etc. — until the situation gets so frustrating that you can only turn it on yourself. Is it narcissistic? Sure, but if the only thing you can change is yourself in these circumstances, blaming your own feelings for the spectacular run of bad luck you’ve had is pretty much the only way to get through it. We all can’t be Job — sometimes, the only to shore is to get pelted by the waves.