If I Had Legs I’d Kick You Trailer Featuring Rose Byrne
A24 has shared the official trailer and poster for If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, a tour de force from writer-director Mary Bronstein starring Berlinale Silver Bear winner Rose Byrne, Conan O’Brien, and A$AP Rocky.
Also starring Danielle Macdonald and Christian Slater, the film is scheduled to open in theaters this October. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association (MPA) for language, some drug use, and bloody images.
With her life crashing down around her, Linda (Rose Byrne) attempts to navigate her child’s mysterious illness, her absent husband, a missing person, and an increasingly hostile relationship with her therapist. With the whiplash pace of a thriller, writer/director Mary Bronstein takes audiences into a breathtakingly inventive, unexpectedly funny, yet startlingly relatable, fever-dream of parental anxiety.
Rose Byrne (Platonic) gives a one-of-a-kind cinematic portrait of ultra-pressurized motherhood as Linda, an overwhelmed therapist who finds herself in a state of frenzy and obsessive dread as she grapples with a mounting series of head-spinning crises.
The result is a gripping tale of personal horror and a moving illumination of that moment in life when it all becomes too much. Full of mordant wit and free-diving imagination, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You begins with a stressed-out mom trying, and failing, to calmly handle her child’s mysterious, treatment-resistant illness.
Bronstein takes that unsettling situation—and its accompanying deluge of fear, fury, disorientation, and self-blame—in thrilling directions, finding her own richly entertaining emotional language to express Linda’s stultifying experience.
Throughout, Linda’s child remains out of view, her young voice heard, but her presence largely unseen save for the winding plastic feeding tube to which Linda is tied 24/7…a tube that grows in its omnipresence and threat throughout the film. Then, a minor disaster in Linda’s family apartment displaces her and the child to a purgatorial motel world far beyond her comfort zone. A patient goes missing. Bad decisions multiply.
And as her grip on reality slips and Linda’s unraveling psyche draws disdain even from her therapist, she descends into a nightmare state in which fearsome dependencies, inequities, and neuroses seem to boil up out of an ever-enlarging, increasingly terrifying abyss of unfulfillable needs.
“What interested me most was attempting to capture the visceral feeling of that desperate mental state where you fear everything is not only falling apart, but that the falling apart is all your fault,” says Bronstein.
“I wanted to get inside that time in life when you feel as if somebody is constantly yelling at you, although nobody is actually yelling at you; when you feel like one more thing will push you over the edge; and when you’re in such a deeply stressed, out-of-your-mind state that all problems become equal.”
