If I Had Legs I’d Kick You: Rose Byrne Delivers a Career-High Turn in Pitch-Black Horror-Comedy

Rose Byrne leads a tense, close-up portrait of a therapist unraveling in Mary Bronstein’s psychological horror-comedy, a film that positions parental exhaustion and postnatal depression at its center. The performance and film’s formal choices make this release notable ahead of its arrival in UK and Irish cinemas on 20 February.

What happened and what’s new

The film, written and directed by Mary Bronstein and produced by Ronald Bronstein alongside Josh Safdie, presents a narrow, intense study of a mother who is also a practicing psychotherapist. Rose Byrne plays Linda, whose husband is absent while she cares for an infant daughter who is fed through a machine and whose face remains offscreen until the film’s closing moments. The child’s ongoing medical needs—transporting a feeding device to a pediatric day-care ward—are among the logistical pressures shown driving Linda’s stress.

Other immediate plot and production details: the hospital ward is overseen by a brusque doctor portrayed by the director in a cameo; a fellow therapist who shares an adjacent office is cast as an impatient colleague; a motel superintendent named James, one of the few sympathetic characters, appears as Linda’s temporary point of contact after environmental damage forces her from her apartment. The film stages repeated images of domestic collapse—an apartment with a gaping hole in the ceiling, a motel stay, and abrupt, darkly comic visual beats, including a striking juxtaposition of animal harm and banal domestic imagery.

Rose Byrne's performance and what's new

Rose Byrne’s portrayal emphasizes the dissonance between a caregiver’s professional composure and private disintegration. On screen she manages coping mechanisms that include substance use and fraught therapy encounters; in one sequence she confesses affection to a colleague in a tone that undercuts the usual therapist-client dynamic. The direction keeps the lead almost constantly in tight close-up, allowing the actor’s shifts in expression to signal mounting panic and an accumulating sadness rather than relying on supernatural elements.

Behind the headline

Context: the film frames parental burnout and postnatal depression as the primary engines of dread, choosing mundane, logistical crises over overt horror tropes. The production team intentionally centers the mother’s experience; formal choices—persistent close framing and withholding the infant’s face—stress how caregiving can become an all-consuming problem rather than a full person in the protagonist’s perception.

Incentives and constraints: the creative team appears drawn to an intimate, discomforting tone that blends dark comedy with psychological collapse. Constraining the story to a single perspective and to minimally externalized threat narrows audience focus on the protagonist’s interior life, a strategy that heightens performance demands on the lead actor and the director’s control of mood.

Stakeholders: the writer-director and producers shape the film’s framing; the lead performer carries narrative weight; supporting performers populate the institutional and domestic systems that both fail and sustain the protagonist. Audiences and critics will be primary arbiters of how the film’s blend of comedy and distress is received.

What we still don’t know

• How wider audiences will respond to the film’s bleak, close-up style and its treatment of postnatal depression.
• The full narrative significance of the infant’s offscreen presence and whether that choice resolves unequivocally in the film’s final moments.
• Box-office expectations and the film’s planned release beyond the stated UK and Irish opening.
• Whether the production’s tonal mix will translate into awards attention or polarized critical reception.

What happens next

• Audience and critical reaction in initial release territories will determine the film’s wider rollout and festival traction; strong acclaim could prompt broader distribution decisions.
• If viewers and critics embrace the lead performance, that could elevate the film’s profile and open opportunities for the creative team to pursue similarly intimate, risky projects.
• Conversely, if the blend of bleak humor and psychological strain proves divisive, the film may find a smaller, more niche audience focused on arthouse and genre crossover.
• Industry response to the film’s handling of postnatal depression may spur conversations about depiction of parental mental health in fiction and the responsibilities of storytellers portraying such experiences.

Why it matters

The film foregrounds a real-world problem—parental stress and postnatal depression—inside a stylized, tightly controlled cinematic frame. Practically, that affects how viewers interpret depictions of caregiving breakdowns and the role of professional boundaries when caregivers themselves are vulnerable. In the near term, the film’s reception will shape opportunities for the director and lead performers and may influence how future films approach the intersection of domestic life and psychological crisis.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You opens in UK and Irish cinemas from 20 February. Rose Byrne’s central performance and the film’s formal restraint are positioned as the primary elements critics and audiences will weigh in early reactions.