Mary Bronstein on If I Had Legs I’d Kick You and motherhood’s brutality

Mary Bronstein describes motherhood as a kind of brainwashing. “You go from being a fully formed human being with a favourite band, your own personal style and opinions, to someone’s mother,” the director says. “That is the identity that you embody fully to the point that questioning it feels like betraying your love for your baby.”

Bronstein started writing her new movie, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, after her own daughter became extremely ill and had to be taken from their home in New York to San Diego for treatment. It was Bronstein who traveled with the then-seven-year-old while her husband, Uncut Gems writer Ronald Bronstein, stayed. Using this experience and running with it for her new film, she radically asks, how does one maintain their personhood in the face of also being a mom? “You can’t say, fuck it, let’s burn it all down,” Bronstein reasons. “So how does one contend with that?”

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Bronstein’s first film in over a decade, is a brutally frank dark comedy that pushes that initial question into bold new cinematic territory. “I’m one of those people who’s not supposed to be a mom,” says the film’s central character Linda (Rose Byrne) towards the start of the movie as she feels the weight of childcare beginning to make her spine creak. Over the space of several claustrophobic days, while her ship-captain husband is away from home, Linda battles a myriad of issues as she shepherds their unnamed daughter to and from doctors appointments, attempts to fix an enormous and unexplained hole that’s opened in the ceiling of her apartment, and manages her therapy patients. As the movie progresses, the tension slowly ratchets up until the feeling of panic is inescapable. It’s a grueling watch built around a knockout performance from Byrne and relatable to anyone trying to do their best while fighting what feels like forces beyond their control.

The movie is Bronstein’s long-awaited follow-up to her 2008 debut Yeast, a micro-budget indie movie starring Greta Gerwig about a young woman bouncing between two toxic friendships that helped refresh the male-centric mumblecore scene of the time. After so long away, If I Had Legs… feels like a rare gem from a director with a small, but perfectly formed, filmography that gives a voice to the feelings people, women in particular, are conditioned to keep to themselves.

Bronstein’s lengthy time between movies may speak to the problems female directors face financing uncompromising movies about motherhood, though If I Had Legs… is not alone in its depiction of women pushing back against the expectation of starting a family as a solely life-affirming experience. Nightbitch, American director Marielle Heller’s 2024 adaptation of the Rachel Yoder novel, took a literal approach to the feral feeling of toddler-induced exhaustion by depicting a mother who transformed into a dog at night. 2021’s The Lost Daughter, meanwhile, centers a middle-aged university professor who feels conflicting waves of love and resentment while on holiday with her daughter in Greece. If I Had Legs… is similarly knotty and sympathetic to its main character while unloading the burden she feels onto the viewer, placing them radically in her point of view and asking them to see her as a person, not just a woman with a child.

Bronstein tackles this quandary through a mixture of dramatic tension and gallows humor. Watching the film, it’s easy to sympathize with Linda but If I Had Legs… also heaps emergency on top of misery and demands a reaction by backing viewers into a corner. It manifests into a film that speaks a unique language, blending straight-up drama with elements from horror, surrealism, experimental filmmaking, and dark humour. “I am attempting a tightrope walk,” Bronstein says of the film’s tone.

She admits not everyone will find her movie funny, even if she finds parts of it hilarious. She refers to one scene, in which a pet hamster meets a grizzly end, as splitting audiences between the “gaspers” and the “hard laughers.” “There’s a couple of ways that our body releases tension,” Bronstein says of her choice to include these moments. “One is crying and one is laughing. If you’re going to go as far as I am into the darkness, you have to give people a release even if it’s uncomfortable after, when they’re not sure that they should be laughing.”

In addition to challenging its audience to laugh, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You also asks viewers to reconsider preconceived notions about Rose Byrne. The Australian actor, best known for parts in broader comedy movies such as Bridesmaids and the Apple TV series Platonic, has long excelled in roles that ask her prim exterior to fray at the edges but stay largely aspirational. Here, she is required to come apart at the seams. The indignities mount up as Linda seeks help from her husband (played by Christian Slater as a disinterested voice on the telephone), is patronized by contractors, scolded by doctors, and deals with difficult patients at work. She is offered brief respite only by smoking and drinking late at night with James, a staff member at the motel in which she stays, played by the charismatic A$AP Rocky.

In the film, Linda is described as “stretchable” by her daughter, a character Bronstein chooses to largely keep off camera. Speaking to her therapist (Conan O’Brien in a refreshingly sympathetic role), Linda underlines the way her malleability is used against her.

“It’s sort of taken for granted that when you turn a certain age you know what to do,” Bronstein reflects on what might be interpreted as Linda’s weakness. “My experience, and the experience of everyone I know intimately, is we’re all just making choices all day long to get through the day and hope that they’re the right ones.” The big betrayal of becoming an adult, she believes, is “when you realize that nobody knows what the fuck they’re doing. It’s scary as hell.”

What Bronstein expresses through Linda is a relatable desire for that endless conveyor belt of decisions to be taken away, even just temporarily. “If people were more honest they would admit that it’s a human experience to not know what you’re doing or why you’re doing it or even what’s going to happen next,” Bronstein says. “And that’s OK because the universe is chaos.” Underneath its dark heart, If I Had Legs… makes that chaos feel like less of an isolated experience.