Rose Byrne’s face fills the screen in the opening moments of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You because that’s how close the camera needs to be to register the astonishing subtlety of her performance. “Mommy is stretchable,” we hear a child say offscreen, casually, as we notice a slight tremor just below Byrne’s eye. As Linda—mother of a child seemingly suffering from Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder, necessitating feeding by stomach tube—Byrne has bigger, breakdown moments (including an ongoing feud with a hospital parking attendant), but it’s the tiny touches that reverberate with recognizability. (At one point, the exhausted Linda falls asleep before she can get her second leg out of her tights.) Even when she widens beyond Byrne’s strained face, writer-director Mary Bronstein restricts our view of the child, a provocative choice that emphasizes Linda’s loneliness and gives If I Had Legs I’d Kick You an eerie air. As the movie introduces other elements of psychological horror (including a hole that opens in the ceiling of Linda’s bedroom), the imaginative gestures felt a bit removed from the specificity of the medical situation at hand (even though ARFID is never explicitly named). The movie vacillates between a metaphorical meditation on the debilitating demands of motherhood in general and a reality-based drama about dealing with a particular child eating disorder, yet Byrne gives a performance that’s game for both.
(12/13/2025)
