A woman, struggling to care for others while barely holding herself together, confronts a mysterious hole in her ceiling that awakens buried memories.
Strange and unique at the same time. Writer/director Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is the kind of film that feels like it is made of patterns – emotional, visual, and psychological – and it weaponises those repetitions to explore how people break down internally while still trying to function externally. It adopts that distinctly A24-style storytelling: intimate, surreal, tonally ambiguous, and centred around a wonderfully complex lead performance. Rose Byrne delivers the film’s emotional backbone, embodying a person simultaneously pleading for help and pretending not to need any. Her existential outburst isn’t melodramatic, as it feels frighteningly recognisable.
One recurring motif is the ritual of people hanging up on each other. It sounds simple, almost comedic, yet it slowly evolves into a language of abandonment, exhaustion, and emotional self-preservation. Characters withdraw not because they don’t care, but because they are drowning too. This feeds into the film’s central cycle: people who desperately need help trying to take care of others who also desperately need help. The film keeps whispering, “It’s not your fault,” while quietly asking: Then why does it still hurt so much?
The otherworldly hole in the ceiling becomes a metaphor for intrusion – trauma leaking into the present, memory looping back on itself. Its circularity ties to the repeated emotional patterns and, more importantly, to synchronised healing, suggesting that recovery rarely happens alone. The film doesn’t explain the hole; it lets it echo.
Even the parking lot problem becomes symbolic. It’s the mundane nightmare of modern existence – constantly circling, no space, no room to breathe, nowhere to leave the emotional baggage. Repetition becomes pressure; pressure becomes implosion.
Communication in the film isn’t merely flawed; it’s chaotic. Voices overlap, interrupt, and distort, mirroring the inner noise of anxiety and paranoia. What we see and what is real drift apart, and perception becomes a threat of its own.
Stylistically, the film is a descendant of a narrative mode once seen in HBO drama and now perfected by A24: the merging of surrealism with realism, the literal with the poetic. It is cinema that doesn’t resolve but provokes. The ending does not offer closure. You bring yourself to it, and what you get back depends on who you are and how you’ve lived.
One last food for thought: Why don’t we get to see the daughter in whole?
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