One of the best films we saw at Sundance this year was Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, an incredible (and incredibly stressful) portrait of a woman on the verge of collapse. Anchored by a brilliant — and we mean brilliant — performance by Rose Byrne, this is a movie that’s both absurdly funny and deliriously upsetting, and get ready to hear the same old complaints that we heard about Uncut Gems again. Instead of sweating parlays, though, you’ll be sweating the parking agent at your daughter’s hospital. We were wondering when A24 was finally going to put this on the release calendar, and it looks like it’s not too long away: hence, this trailer, which they dropped earlier on Wednesday.
Take a look:
If you don’t have the time to check out our review from Sundance (boo to you!), here’s a nice little synopsis for If I Had Legs I’d Kick You from this year’s NYFF program:
“The nightmarish stresses of motherhood and work are pushed to their absurdist extremes in Mary Bronstein’s stellar piece of cinematic anxiety, starring a bravura Rose Byrne as a woman on the verge of something far beyond a nervous breakdown. A therapist whose life has become one crisis after another, Linda (Byrne) and her young daughter (who requires a feeding tube due to a mysterious illness) have had to relocate to a motel following a cataclysmic ceiling leak in their house. Meanwhile, her own therapist and colleague (Conan O’Brien, unlike you’ve ever seen him) has reached his own boiling point, her toughest patient (Danielle Macdonald) is a needy bundle of nerves that’s spilling over into Linda’s personal life, and her belligerent husband (Christian Slater) is unhelpfully away on a business trip. Bronstein’s breathless, pressure-cooker visual approach and Byrne’s fearlessly committed performance (which earned her the Silver Bear at this year’s Berlinale) contribute to a full-throttle film that depicts life as a series of never-ending fires—without losing its sense of fanciful humor. An A24 release.”
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You will do the rounds on the North America festival circuit (it’s playing both TIFF and NYFF) before making its way to a theater near you at some point in the fall.