TIFF 2025 Review: If I Had Legs I’d Kick You – “confident and balanced.”

You know that feeling when you’re so incredibly frustrated that your jaw hurts from clenching your teeth so badly?  That high point of stress where things seem so overwhelming, you just feel like giving up? These are the moments to which the title If I Had Legs I’d Kick You refers.  

This makes the film a bit of a hard watch. And not in the way that sentence sounds.  This is a good movie, a great one even, but man can you ever just feel the anxiety pouring off the screen and making its way into your soul.  The vector for this is Linda (Rose Byrne), a woman who is slowly unravelling, who has reached her breaking point.  

Linda is a woman who has a lot of stressors in her life, big and small.  Her daughter is suffering from a mysterious disease that finds her needing to be fed through a feeding tube.  Her daughter confirms to her that she’s not getting better, and so each night Linda must hook a liquid diet up to an IV pump and allow her child to receive the nutrients she needs to live, since she will not eat on her own.  The doctors give her unrealistic weight gain goals before the tube can be removed, the support group she is supposed to be part of only seems to reinforce to Linda that this is all her fault.

Then a giant hole opens up in the ceiling of the family’s apartment, water gushing into her bedroom, forcing them to move to a motel.  Linda’s husband, Charles (played in cameo by Christian Slater), is off being a captain of a ship in the Caribbean.  His phone calls are the opposite of helpful.  He just wants the hole fixed, ignoring Linda’s cries for help as she tries to balance their daughter, her job, and a useless contractor.  Linda’s only outlet is her therapist (Conan O’Brien in some excellent casting), who is… not a good therapist.  

That is, if you don’t count wine and a little weed as an outlet.  As the day melds into night, Linda’s only company is the beep of that IV pump, a noise the audience also learns to loathe with the film’s excellent sound design. Occasionally, a neighbour at the motel (A$AP Rocky) joins her.  But Linda is largely alone.  Alone too with her own thoughts, where she struggles with the trauma and guilt of her day-to-day life.  

Writer and director Mary Bronstein creates one of the most stressful viewing experiences in recent memory and one that will resonate with viewers.  Your acceptance of the large metaphorical, aforementioned hole, which starts to take on aspects of magical realism, may influence just how deeply you feel this movie, but I encourage you to go with Bronstein’s vision.  It’s confident and balanced.  It adds dark humour and compassion in a film where there could easily be none.  

Bronstein hoists the weight of this film straight on Rose Byrne’s shoulders, and she proves herself more than capable in a performance that should find itself in the midst of awards contention this season.  Byrne is in almost every frame of this film, largely by herself, often in close-up.  Bronstein’s decision not to actually show the daughter’s face for the vast majority of the film means that even in conversation, the camera is firmly on Linda and her reactions.  This film is about emotion and Bronstein captures all of it.  Every muscle of Byrne’s face is acting in this movie, each controlled breath in the midst of immense anxiety, a measured choice. But it’s not overacting, it’s so natural.  Byrne has had some excellent roles in her career, but this just may be her best. 

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is uncomfortable, it’s tense and claustrophobic.  It’s not a film you will likely watch on repeat.  But at the same time it feels acutely authentic.  Not everyone will have the same experiences as Linda, a woman who is ruled by the holes in her life – whether it’s the one in the ceiling or the stoma that feeds her daughter.  Yet, at its core, the film is about a woman who is underappreciated and overwhelmed.  Perhaps nothing is more relatable than that.  

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You was reviewed as part of the Toronto International Film Festival.  It is released in North American theatres October 10, 2025.  It will also screen as part of the BFI London Film Festival October 13th and 14th.

Note – for those who are bothered by scenes involving animals there is a scene involving a hamster that might be a bit stressful.  That said, when bad things happen the hamster is very obviously fake (so even for me, it wasn’t worrisome).