If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
*Trigger warnings around postpartum depression, anxiety, and mental health. Some spoilers.*
One of my passions is highlighting cinema that brings attention and catharsis to the mom-experience. So get your popcorn, pour the wine, and text the mom group chat. Oscar season has officially entered its “mothers are not okay” era. In the wake of Nightbitch and Die My Love, Director-Writer Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You explores the experience of an isolated, burdened mother (Linda) who is managing her daughter’s illness while slowly unraveling from doing it all. In just the opening five minutes of this film, Rose Byrne delivers a polemic of new motherhood so frighteningly accurate that the plot ceases to matter. She is strong, and brittle. By the time she’s cramming pizza cheese in her mouth — we’re relating.
As the film unfolds, we learn that Linda’s husband is “off at sea”. She is left alone to manage a (literal) hole in the ceiling, a sick child, and a full-time job — exposing a familiar imbalance to all moms who serve as the primary or only caregiver. Adding another layer of irony, Linda herself is a therapist, counseling a new mother through postpartum anxiety.
What helps the film not drown under its own watery depths are supporting characters Conan O’Brien, Rose’s disaffected therapist, and her new “friend” the very watchable A$AP Rocky. Without giving away any spoilers, the cinematography choices surprise, and land. Moms are routinely invisible in our culture, but here the camera refuses to look away. It doggedly tracks Linda, in the mundane, neurotic, comical, traumatizing, and absurd.
Your heart aches for her. You immediately want to enlist help for her cause: family support, present husband, effective therapist, mom tribe, spa month, and especially an effective contractor. And that’s the not so subtle point.
It’s easy to watch Linda and think, she needs help. But for many women, asking for help feels like a moral referendum on being a “good” or “successful” mom. An inner, preliminary test on whether we love our child “enough.”
Enough to miss sleep. Enough to exclusively BF. Enough to skip date nights. Time with friends. Time alone. Enough to quietly disappear. Meanwhile, the other mom — the one on Instagram in neutral tones, standing in front of a perfect nursery — appears to manage it all effortlessly. So if she can do it, shouldn’t we?
IIHLIKY begs to differ.
Then, the third-act scene (1:24). The one that explains why she feels like a “mom fraud.” In a moment of raw, unfiltered honesty, she admits something many women are afraid to articulate: she has never fully felt at ease inside the identity of “mother.”
So many of us stumble through these early years — managing feeding schedules, playtime, medical appointments, laundry that inexplicably multiplies — all while trying to reclaim some coherent sense of self. Is it any wonder the identity of “mom” can feel so loaded? The moment you become one, there’s already a version of the definition you’re failing to meet.
If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You is a darkly moving portrait of modern motherhood. Beyond its quiet referendum on the lack of structural support for women, it functions as a muted warning — not about individual failure, but about systems stretched thin.
My hope is that more mothers feel validated in their struggles and emboldened to seek help (without translating that need into weakness).
Mom tip: follow it with a generous dose of SNL and dessert.
And let’s cheer Rose Byrne for her astonishing performance. If there’s justice this awards season, this mom of two kids walks away with a very well-deserved Oscar.
