Cinecism: The Crisis of Millennial Parenting in ‘If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’
Words: Maia Wyman
In a sweeping year-end wrap-up for Indie Wire, David Ehrlich made note of a particular theme that seemed to dominate the film oeuvre of 2025: the crisis of parenting in a futureless world. This phenomenon can be attributed, writes Ehrlich, in part to a generation of filmmakers who have somewhat recently become parents, and in part due to the way that everybody seems to have “found themselves haunted by the prospect of creating new life at the end of history.” While Ehrlich points to a number of films that are concerned with this crisis, I’d venture that the unique vision of hell painted by Mary Bronstein in her sophomore feature, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, more viscerally captured the horrors of our time than any other film of last year.
If I Had Legs was one of two films last fall to depict the frayed edges of motherhood. The other was Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love, which centres on Jennifer Lawrence as Grace, a new mother living in isolation and struggling to maintain her grip on reality. But Ramsay’s hesitance to fully lean into her source material, and her impulse to place undue focus on Jennifer Lawrence’s beauty, transforms post-partum psychosis into an oddly “sexy” affair. I was thus eager for something a bit uglier, and If I Had Legs delivered.
Linda, played by the marvelous Rose Byrne, is a Montauk-based psycho-therapist whose slowly deteriorating mental state can be attributed to a series of mundane, but anxiety-inducing events: her young daughter suffering from a pediatric feeding disorder; the ceiling of her home collapsing inwards and leaving in its place a ghastly asbestos-laden hole; a runaway client. It’s likely that Linda would ordinarily be able to tackle each issue with a level head, but without the support of her husband, who is away on an eight-week long work trip, she’s left to crumble under their weight.
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“Linda’s attempts to throw herself into the great nothingness of the ocean, only to be washed repeatedly back to shore, allows her to see beyond the trap of her anxieties, and finally step confidently into the role she has been shirking for the duration of the film [“I’ll be better”].”
Bronstein, who shopped the script around for several years before it was finally picked up in 2023, is unyielding in her approach. Incorporating elements of phantasmagoria by externalising Linda’s mental state as images of throbbing, galactic clusters of light. Or with Linda’s child, for example, who remains faceless for the majority of the movie. Her voice a whine stitched into a tapestry of incessant background noises no more prominent to us, or Linda, than the beeping of the feeding machine or the inane babble of Linda’s patients. All is absorbed into that galactic cluster because Linda suffers from a “dead brain thing,” a mind with absolutely no space left inside.
This is a movie about the limits of human capacity. Linda is crumbling, but unable to fully embody this feeling for fear of slipping out of her motherly role and scaring her sickly child. Her maternal autopilot allows her to miraculously carry on the rote tasks of everyday life, but she feels or hears none of it. Bronstein then mirrors this with an exploration of Linda’s career. Linda is both a therapist with little ability to help her patients, and patient to a fellow therapist, played by Conan O’Brian, who is both victim of her constant needling, and perpetrator of the very limits Linda exhibits in her own practice. O’Brian’s therapist is not a bad one per se, but his stony implacability makes you want to throttle him. It also reminds you that he, like Linda, is only human, and only has so much to give.
This is then further mirrored in Linda’s runaway patient, Caroline, who experiences to a crippling degree the anxiety of having to keep her child alive. Where Linda chooses to disassociate from her child, Caroline fixates. But both women attempt to escape this eternal responsibility by running away from their families, towards the ocean. The beach has a contradictory function for Linda and Caroline. It can be seen as the extent of human limits, the precipice of nothingness, or a holy cleansing of their motherly sins. I see it as both. For the entire film, there is something vast and unexplainable beyond that round orifice - on the second level of her house, inside the belly of her child, but Linda can only see the hole [it must be noted that “hole,” here, is used to great effect - “here are pics of hope forgot to send today, I took during lunch”]. Linda’s attempts to throw herself into the great nothingness of the ocean, only to be washed repeatedly back to shore, allows her to see beyond the trap of her anxieties, and finally step confidently into the role she has been shirking for the duration of the film [“I’ll be better”].
Millennial parents are grappling with an unprecedentedly existential moment in human history. The choice to even have a child is now of the greatest ethical concern. It’s as if having a kid requires a refusal to look inside the hole, at the great nothingness beyond. In doing so, you can go on autopilot, you can collapse under the weight of the anxiety, or you can forgive yourself and keep moving. Bronstein does not tell us which is the best way forward, but she articulates the metaphorical tube of responsibility, to children and to ourselves, that keeps us, somehow, still going.
