If I Had Legs I'd Kick You: How A Mom's Experience Became The Most Anxiety-Inducing Film Of The Year
At the 2026 Oscars, Rose Byrne is nominated for her role in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. In the film, Byrne plays a mom pushed to the edge while caring for her sick daughter. The film was drawn from the real experience of filmmaker Mary Bronstein.
The film addresses the aspects of motherhood we rarely see on screen. “I think right now, we’re in a very, very, weird place for women, and we’re in an even weirder place for mothers in our society because of how our rights are being taken away. “It’s a weird time to be a mom,” Bronstein told SheKnows in January. “Our rights about how we can decide to have a child, if we’re allowed to make that decision for ourselves, who has the resources to make that decision? Who doesn’t? It feels very scary.”
When Bronstein’s 7-year-old daughter got sick, the duo moved their lives from their Chelsea apartment in New York to a tiny motel room in San Diego, the only place where Bronstein could access treatment for her little girl.
There, with the lights out at 8pm to let her daughter rest, Bronstein found herself crushed into a motel bathroom, trying to clutch on to her own identity amid takeout containers and the stress of caring for a sick kid. With her husband, Safdie brothers collaborator Ronald Bronstein, back in New York working on Good Time, Bronstein found her mental health deteriorating at a rapid pace.
“I’m sitting on the tiles, and I would be drinking $10 wine and binge eating a lot of Jack in the Box, candy, Stouffer’s microwave meals,” she tells Rolling Stone. “I felt I was having an existential crisis. I was disappearing into the task at hand.”
Bronstein was told her daughter’s treatment would take six weeks but as two months went by in that motel room and soon her fears grew bigger, extending to life after her daughter’s treatment.
“I had to put my whole self into caring for my daughter, trying to get her better, and getting back to New York. I felt a real dread,” she explains to Cultured. “But then I realized that the dread wasn’t about what was going on at that moment. The dread became, ‘She’s gonna get better and we are going to go back to New York—and then what? Who am I? What am I going to do?'”
Eight months passed and, amid her maternal sacrifice, Bronstein stopped recognizing herself. From that place, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You was born — Bronstein’s sophomore film and a follow-up to her 2008 movie Yeast.
In it, Rose Byrne plays Linda, a Long Island therapist who, after a cacophony of misfortune, is forced to move out of her decaying apartment and into a motel room all while desperately trying to make her sick daughter better.
Combining dark comedy with surrealist horror, the film is a Sisyphean journey through a mother’s attempts to do it all.
Linda spends her days struggling to have empathy for her clients, arguing with the parking attendant at her daughter’s treatment facility, taking blame from doctors, listening to her husband complain over the phone as he works at sea, and feeding her daughter through a tube.
As those who are supposed to help Linda — her husband (voiced by Christian Slater) and apathetic therapist (Conan O’Brien) — fail her, she finds unlikely support in motel super James (A$AP Rocky) but the descent into madness continues in ways only a mom could understand. As Rolling Stone succinctly put it: “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You Gives You The Nonstop Panic Attack That Is Motherhood.”
Bronstein’s daughter, now 15, is doing better now but motherhood is not and Bronstein knows it. Her film talks back to the White House’s agenda to push women to have more kids, it offers an outlook that tradwife influencers edit out of their homesteading TikToks, and proves that caregivers can’t stand up alone in a broken system.