Linda is a psychotherapist who is stretched to her limits while caring for her daughter, who has a pediatric feeding disorder that necessitates nightly supplemental feeding through a tube and participation in a day hospital program, which Linda drives her to and from every day. Linda's husband, Charles, is away at work as a ship captain.
The family's situation worsens when their Montauk apartment is flooded after the ceiling collapses. Linda is forced to move with their daughter into a shabby motel. While living there, Linda meets a snarky clerk named Diana and her neighbor James, the motel superintendent. Linda struggles to sleep with the noise of her daughter's internal feeding pump. She spends sleep-deprived nights outside the motel room, drinking wine, smoking marijuana, listening to music, and eating junk food. During the night, Linda also leaves her daughter to check on her apartment repairs, which have been left in limbo by the contractor's sudden departure.
Professionally, Linda is surrounded by difficult and demanding clients, including Caroline, a new mother suffering from paranoia and postpartum anxiety. Linda also seeks therapy from another colleague, who is largely unhelpful and increasingly exasperated by her lack of professional boundaries. When Charles calls to check in on Linda, he is critical and unsupportive, stating he wishes he could "sit around all day" as a therapist. Her daughter's doctor in the day hospital program is also unsympathetic and reprimands Linda for frequently missing family therapy sessions. She tells Linda that if her daughter does not meet her weight goals by the end of the week, her daughter's level of care will be reassessed. Linda feels she is being set up to fail and that her daughter will not eat more while she relies on the feeding tube.
During a therapy session, Caroline abandons her baby in Linda's office. Linda unsuccessfully tries to get her therapist colleague to help her. She then calls Caroline's husband and requests that he come pick up the baby immediately, but he refuses to leave work to do so, forcing her to call the police. One night, James attempts to bond with Linda. He helps her buy drugs on the dark web and offers emotional support to her daughter. Linda eventually brings James to her apartment to look at the collapsed ceiling due to his experience in the general contracting business, but he falls through the damaged floor and breaks his leg. Linda flees the scene after calling an ambulance for James.
After being told that her daughter cannot make the necessary weight for her feeding tube to be removed, Linda causes a scene at the hospital program's group meeting for mothers in her situation, set off when the doctor tells the group that their children's illnesses are not their fault. Linda confesses to her therapist that she aborted her first pregnancy years before having her daughter and becomes distraught about her failings as a mother. He tells her he will no longer be her therapist. Caroline appears one night at the motel lobby while having a mental health crisis, asking for Linda. As Linda tries to convince her to go to an emergency room, Caroline slaps her and runs away. Linda runs after her in pursuit but loses her on a dark nearby beach.
Returning to the motel, Linda forcibly removes her daughter's tube and has a hallucination of the surgical hole closing. When Linda returns to her apartment, she discovers that Charles has suddenly returned home and has had the hole in the ceiling repaired. Upon returning to the motel with Charles in tow, she tries to hide that she left their daughter alone at the motel, but encounters James in the hotel room, who reveals that he is only there because Linda's daughter was panicking, resulting in him gaining entry to the room to try to calm her down. When Charles sees that Linda has removed the feeding tube, Linda runs to the beach. She repeatedly runs into the ocean but is thrown back to shore by heavy waves. Linda wakes up on the beach with her daughter beside her. She promises that she'll "be better," and the girl smiles.
If I Had Legs I'd Kick You began filming in August[7] and September 2023[8] in Montauk, New York after SAG-AFTRA granted an interim agreement for the film amidst the actors' strike.[9] The film was shot over 27 days, with Bronstein giving up her director's fee to obtain two additional shooting days. Due to the film's limited budget, surrealist elements of the film had to be recorded during post-production by Bronstein and the director of photography alone.[10]
The film was Bronstein's first movie since her 2008 debut Yeast. According to Bronstein, she wrote the film as a means of processing the trauma she experienced while caring for her 7-year-old daughter, who was suffering from severe health problems at the time.[11]
The first physical releases on Blu-ray and DVD were in Canada on December 23, 2025.[22]
Reception
Critical reception
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 92% of 190 critics' reviews are positive.The website's consensus reads: "Liable to leave audiences in a cold sweat, this fever dream immersion into parental stress connects with thunderous force thanks to Rose Byrne's gutsy star turn and director Mary Bronstein's uncompromising vision."[23]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 77 out of 100, based on 34 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.[24]
Critics praised Byrne's performance, with Jeanette Catsoulis of The New York Times and Glenn Whipp of the Los Angeles Times calling it "magnificent".[25][26] David Fear of Rolling Stone wrote, "[Rose Byrne] is particularly on-point here, the sort of exquisitely raw, white-knuckle performance that feels so voyeuristic and personal that, if you had any decency, you’d look away. She ensures that you can’t".[27]
Multiple commentators compared the film favorably to Uncut Gems. Stephanie Zacharek of Time described the film as "Uncut Gems for moms". Zacharek and Whipp respectively pointed out Bronstein's husband is a frequent collaborator with the Safdie brothers and Josh Safdie is credited as one of the film's producers.[26][28]
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