“Mommy is stretchable,” says the lilting voice of a child from offscreen. Daddy is “hard,” she tells an unseen counselor. But when mommy gets mad, she’s more “like putty.” Elastic. Malleable. Sculpted by the wills of others. As the child shares her crude impressions of her parents in the opening scene of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, the camera stays fixed on mom, Linda (Rose Byrne), whose marrow-deep exhaustion is laid bare in close-up. Her eyes water and wobble as she pulls her face into an awkward rictus. She’s not sad, she claims—but why shouldn’t she be? Mothering is hard, often alienating (from yourself, from others). But if the fantasy of the perfect mother, cheerfully tending to her flock, doesn’t hold sway over families the way it used to, an outline of those expectations, as Bronstein’s film makes clear, remains pressed into women’s subconscious: Why does caring for something I love make me so unhappy?

One practical answer is that Linda is stretched thin. Her husband (Christian Slater), a cruise-ship captain, is at sea, yet again, leaving her to shoulder the work of parenting while juggling her day job as a therapist. The child—who remains nameless and offscreen, or visually obscured, for most of the film—also suffers from a mysterious illness that has left her, we learn, underweight. It’s Linda’s job to make sure that her little one is hitting her weight-gain benchmarks, but getting her to eat is another problem, one that snowballs into a separate one when the child’s doctors (one of whom is played, icily, by Bronstein herself) threaten to end her treatment. Neither child nor mother takes the requirements of convalescence seriously enough. Fate also deals our run-down heroine an ugly hand when a leak in her apartment creates a massive hole in her bedroom ceiling, forcing her and the kid to move to a nearby motel while repairmen tend to the mess. The chaos of these unfortunate circumstances is augmented by Linda’s woozy nightly escapades. She downs a bottle or two of wine, smokes some joints, and plays rock music on her iPhone into the wee hours of the morning, half-listening to her slumbering child through a baby monitor. 

But rather than pile on new crises to gradually ramp up the stakes, Bronstein stages a test of endurance: How long before Linda cracks? Unlike the mythological wife who waits for her spouse to return from sea with a steely dignity, Linda floats through her story in a hallucinatory fashion. The Montauk coastline—a stone’s throw from her dingy motel room—offers watery visuals that echo this flurried state. “Time is a series of things to get through,” she tells her own therapist (Conan O’Brien), inadvertently admitting to her depression (and giving the viewer a reason for the film’s uncanny rhythm and flights of surrealism). The hole in her apartment emits an eerie sparkle, and in cosmic dream sequences she seems to journey through its void. 

The people around Linda have little sympathy for her, though Bronstein toggles between being outraged by their lack of compassion and finding it perfectly sound. Why is the parking attendant at her kid’s medical center such a stickler? Why does the gothy motel receptionist refuse to sell her wine? They’re just doing their jobs, yet these minor hurdles seem to position Linda in a battle against the world. Byrne’s protean performance, her broad facial contortions that swing—like a silent slapstick star’s visage—between comedy and tragedy, amplifies this air of absurdity. (A bloody incident with a transparently artificial-looking hamster also triggers some nervous laughter.) The film’s deadpan humor reaches its peak in Linda’s meetings with her openly contemptuous therapist, a brick wall of indifference given a farcical edge by O’Brien’s straight-faced delivery. Still, despite looking like “a clown with dull, tiny eyes, the eyes of a crudely painted doll”—to borrow the self-effacing description of the comedian used in the opening credits of his travel show “Conan O’Brien Must Go”—Linda’s therapist is justified in his refusal to, for instance, answer his client’s meandering, personal e-mails, or stop a session with another client when Linda bangs on his office door with a new emergency. Boundaries should be maintained. And why should the world make an exception, suspend its rules, for one woman whose problems are, in the grand scheme of things, relatively banal? 

Yet there’s a meanness to the film that complicates the virtues of boundary-setting, shining a light on the threshold between our self-preserving strategies and our selfish behaviors. Bronstein has explored this gray space before. The toxic intimacy between a trio of egotistical girlfriends living in Brooklyn is the subject of her first film, Yeast (2008), a caustic mumblecore artifact. In the similarly aggro If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, James (A$AP Rocky), a genial motel superintendent, seems to be the only person willing to lend Linda a hand—to which she responds with outright hostility, as if suspicious of ulterior motives. Only her desire for miscellaneous drugs from the dark web, which James has access to, convinces her to cave in to his friendship. Though when the two go to Linda’s apartment for a late-night smoke sesh, she abandons him, whisked away by her phantasms, after he falls through the hole in the ceiling and brutally injures his leg.

The thing about depression is that it warps your sense of self, fractures your connection to others, makes you move through the world as if wading through a bog of mud. If Linda’s behavior isn’t necessarily excusable, it’s at least understandable, a clear product of a profound unwellness. Perhaps the greatest evidence of this tunnel-vision turmoil is the visual absence of Linda’s daughter, who, when she does enter the frame, is seen only in fragments—a pair of legs dangling over the toilet seat; a mess of hair poking out of the motel comforter. She is, in the film’s view, an unknowable, unmanageable little being. We certainly hear her, upsettingly loud and clear, her whining voice a key source of the atmosphere of aggravation. But keeping the child out of sight isn’t just meant to forestall the viewer’s nurturing instincts, holding us firmly on Linda’s wavelength; it’s the film’s central crisis itself: the estrangement between mother and child.

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The “bad mom” movie is practically a genre unto itself, especially in recent years, with films like Tully (2018), Nightbitch (2024), and Die, My Love (2025) all vocalizing the unequal burden of caregiving and the crisis of identity experienced by mothers consumed by their newfound domestic responsibilities. Some of these films take weird, nightmarish turns, overlapping with maternity-minded horror cinema—think Possession (1981) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968)—to give a gruesome, feverish form to the headspaces of mothers on the edge, some suffering from postpartum psychosis. It’s also a genre that has deeper roots—the archetype of the down-and-out mother having been the subject of films like Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970), Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), and John Cassavetes’s Woman Under the Influence (1974), which all grapple with second-wave feminism’s critique of domestic norms. 

When Bronstein turns outward, and one of Linda’s most erratic patients, Caroline (Danielle McDonald), goes MIA mid-appointment and abandons her baby in Linda’s office, the film gestures at the wide scope of this social reality. Funny, given Linda’s insularity, that her job involves carving out space for others and helping them process their woes, though the film cycles through her meetings with needy clients as a way of placing her own issues in context. On the trivial end of the spectrum is a twentysomething regular whose biggest grievance is her banishment from an online consignment shop. Meanwhile, Caroline might be in an abusive relationship—a possibility we glean when Linda calls the younger woman’s husband for help with the deserted child, only to be met with a brutish disavowal.

Only when other mothers seem to break—Caroline, as well as a weeping fellow parent at the medical center—are we dislodged from Linda’s dazed point-of-view, allowing us to peer over her fiefdom’s walls at other outposts of maternal disaffection. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You endorses the well-seasoned argument that women will be judged more fiercely than their male counterparts for their parental failures, gesturing at a constellation of such case studies. Yet Bronstein proves less interested in exploring the gender disparity in childrearing, sidestepping a more generic resolution that entails marital reconciliation and an open acknowledgement of the rift. Instead, the film shines as a character study. As alienating as it is recognizable, Linda’s fickle behavior makes her a poor symbol for all mothers, refreshingly so. 

Bronstein—who played the main character in Yeast, a movie clearly modeled after her own life as a bohemian Brooklynite—has spoken about how If I Had Legs I’d Kick You was born from her own experience raising a sick child. What emerges from the film’s trip down the rabbit hole isn’t just a commentary on the injustice of Linda’s circumstances but, more distinctly, a searing admission of guilt. It’s no coincidence that she’s encircled by people who critique her at every turn and single out her indiscretions, though arguably this relentless hostility is amplified by her own shame. In a meeting for parents (noticeably, all the attendees are mothers) at the medical center, Linda storms off after the doctor played by Bronstein reminds the ladies not to blame themselves for their child’s ailments. For Linda, the statement is a platitude—who else is there to blame but herself? 

Yet perhaps the most nagging reminders of Linda’s inadequacy are the objects used to sustain her child—the grotesquely long tube lodged in her belly button and the perpetually beeping IV used to nourish her overnight. It’s as if she’s plugged into life support, her well-being outsourced to machines because her mother cannot manage. No wonder Linda flees the room overnight, prefers the sting of a hangover or the fog of being stoned. If the hole in her ceiling signals vulnerability and collapse, it’s also a vacuum of meaning, a black orifice of nothingness that Linda is too eager to drift through—anything not to confront her sick child, her broken home. Near her tipping point, Linda’s husband finally returns, breaking her trance and sending her into a panic. She rushes out to the beach, yearning for numbness as she throws herself against the tide. She washes back to shore. Reality sets in, and the last thing we see—Linda’s child, looking down at her bedraggled mother—doubles as an appeal for her to, finally, look at herself.