By Matthew Moorcroft

Highest Recommendation

• Directed by Mary Bronstein
• Starring Rose Byrne, Conan O’Brien, Christian Slater, ASAP Rocky
• R

The bleakly funny and overtly stressful – almost painfully so – If I Had Legs I’d Kick You starts with a flooding, both metaphorically and literally. Literally in that Linda, the at her wit’s end mother and therapist trying to balance having a sick kid, an out of touch husband, clients with their own problems, and now a house that’s falling apart, comes home from a hospital visit with her daughter to find that their house is flooding thanks to a massive hole in the roof that needs to be fixed. As for the metaphorical part, we find that Linda’s emotions are starting to flood over. This has been building for some time; what we are witnessing is not the beginning of the tailspin, but the very end of it and the beginning of what could a near apocalyptic finale.

And it makes sense once you are with Linda for more then 5 minutes. Nobody listens to her at work, with her solace being a colleague who has become increasingly exasperated and clearly doesn’t want to actually help her. Her husband, despite not actually being around all that much if at all, yells and screams at her to do better while he takes time off and goes off on cruises to god knows where. Even her daughter, who Linda clearly loves and wants what is best for her, becomes background noise as she is clearly getting to an age where she wants, wants, wants without much care for the mental toll on other people. The camera almost never leaves Linda’s perspective, and the rare times it does it’s only really to emphasize what is currently in her field of view. So much of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is shot in that uncomfortable close up, leaving Rose Byrne to be the sole contributor on whether or not this movie actually functions.

Thankfully, Rose Byrne is simply magnetic here in an easy career best turn from her. Byrne has always been reliably great but here she completely sheds herself bare; I don’t think there is, or will be, a performance as fierce as her’s. Managing to both find the empathy in a character that could otherwise be found to be exhausting while also maintaining a level of physical comedy that keeps the film humorous in spite of its otherwise dark subject matter, Byrne also shines in her facial acting, saying so much with as simple as a gaze and with that camera stuck on her for the majority of the picture it almost feels like Byrne herself is about to go insane with rage or stress.

That feeling of stress and dread only heightens the further you go into the film, one that almost begs you to despise it as your anxiety gets more and more pronounced and Linda becomes more and more unraveled as the story progresses. A notable encounter with a client who herself is going through the problems of motherhood – and dealing with some of the same background issues that Linda herself is seemingly going through – forces the audience to also reckon with the very real idea of Linda, to an extent, being the cause of her own problems. For as much as she claims to want to be a therapist and like helping people, she very rarely listens to the people who come to her for help and neglects her own needs, pushing the very people away who could actually understand her. This is especially pronounced with her relationship with James, a hotel superintendent who is given a likability thanks to a surprisingly energetic performance by ASAP Rocky.

And then the climax hits, and the unravelling fully happens, and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You finds itself in the ambiguities and the surreality of it’s own creation. The final moments of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You are left to the audience to decide what exactly is happening, but it’s clear that the feeling in your stomach – that of knots twisting and turning – is what it most wants you to feel. As a sensorial experience about the necessary need to cut the umbilical cord, it’s basically unmatched; every loud noise and background voice seems designed to get into your head and possibly distract you from what is right in front of you, which is that there is a woman who desperate needs some kind of help.

I was left mostly floored by If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. It’s one of the most harrowing experiences for movies that I’ve had this past year and certainly one of the scariest non-horror films in recent memory (though many, including myself, would argue that this is indeed a horror film). As bleak cinema goes, you really can’t get much better then this.