If I Had Legs I’d Kick You ★★★★★

Released: 20th February 2026

Director: Mary Bronstein

Starring: Rose Byrne, Conan O’Brien, A$AP Rocky & Christian Slater

Mary Bronstein’s pulsating and beautifully realised If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a titanic force of nature, capturing the strenuous entanglement and unlimited joy of being a mother, a partner, a therapist and a friend. Oscar-nominated Rose Byrne has always been an exceptional and tremendous performer, genre bending between the Insidious franchise, 28 Weeks Later all the way through to front running comedy staples for many households with the likes of Bridesmaids and Instant Family. Her defiant performance as Linda is, for my money, the most illuminating and enrapturing performance of this year.

Linda has plenty going on. Her daughter, who is never named, suffers from a severely acute feeding disorder and is dangerously sick. We endlessly hear the struggle and pain in her voice pierce through the screen for the features entire duration — a prominent vocal performance by Delaney Quinn. Linda’s child is required to have a gastronomic tube — also known as a G-Tube — which is inserted into her belly button, which helps assist in maintaining positive nourishment. Her partner is entirely absent, providing only words over a phone and her job as a therapist comes under such intense scrutiny when a client becomes emotionally unstable. Linda’s clinical supervisor, played remarkably straight by Conan O’Brien, is not very helpful or empathic to the strenuous nature of Linda’s life. This is all only compounded by both the remarkable, Tsai Ming-Liangian, violent flooding and appearance of a gargantuan hole in her apartment. This hole and the space that it occupies acts as such a fantastic metaphor for the rest of the film. Interpreted however the viewer wishes, this vacuous, glistening mesmer can be a vision of internal displacement, isolation, emptiness or rather female beauty, a symbol of the womb or even, at one startlingly moment in the film — opportunity.

Bronstein’s analysis of crisis is remarkably well rendered. With every crisis comes opportunity — and for Linda this involves a multitude of changes to both her personal life and life as a parent and professional. Bronstein’s direction and writing is acutely intense. It is a rarity to leave a close-up or mid-shot of Linda’s tiring face, compounded by an astonishingly breathtaking edit by Lucian Johnston. Johnston’s frenetic edit compliments Christopher Messina’s photography, all in ode to Linda’s borderline, Sisyphean struggle. Out of everything that has been released in the last calendar year, not a single film comes close in its love and care for its main protagonist. Mary Bronstein has such tremendous consideration and admiration for Linda, only further brought to life by Rose Byrne’s tremendous sense of urgency and compassion.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You has its own arresting identity as it navigates through its tumultuous situations; ranging from deeply painful instances and all of the humanistic beauty that comes with it. A$AP ROCKY — the motel superintendent James — brings much needed companionship to Linda, unearthing some lost hedonism, Rocky’s charisma is second to none. Towards the films denouement is one of the most remarkable instances of gastric-based horror one might ever see. It almost acts as as this cathartic unbinding for Linda, her child and the spectator — it is a truly astonishing sequence that embraced me with open arms.

What Mary Bronstein, Rose Byrne and the entire creative team behind If I Had Legs I’d Kick You have achieved here is nothing short of a marvel. A film so deeply concerned with its subject matter that it navigates through it all with a tenderness that is consistently lacking in a lot of work that is released these days. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is an exceptionally special piece of audiovisual work.