The long-awaited second feature from Mary Bronstein, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, is an unyielding subversion of motherhood wrought by anxiety in its most cinematic form. Sitting in the crux between comedy and horror, it presents both a stark reappraisal of conditional acceptance and a needle precision critique of mental health awareness.

Seventeen years on from her mumblecore hit Yeast, If I Had Legs… finally arrives on screens as an expansion in the best direction – Bronstein carries over her beloved formula of intensely stressful character dynamics, where every action taken only delivers chaos, stepping in perfect time with her trademark brutalist comedy. However, her latest feature surprises by bristling with visceral and sincere horror, skilfully leading its audience and characters towards a tapering corner with no escape in sight.

After viewing, I could barely move from my seat – it’s a film that rages with true catharsis, offering a plethora of societal reads that seem almost essayistic in style. It’s so refreshing to see the recent emergence of films centralising women, featuring deeply complicated, unsure or unethical characters, and this is in every sense the pinnacle of that. Barrelling from one scene to the next, somehow there is still time for a sophisticated upturn of maternal instinct – the overriding tone is Bronstein’s deliberate anger at a system that fails to support women and at the larger pressures of parenting an ailing child. A claustrophobic soundscape provides the perfect narrowing tunnel for Rose Byrne’s leading performance, tightly wound and enhancing her best talents – surely a career best. Her dedication to a character battling the impulses of the selfless and the selfish is fascinating, and seeks to set the standard for complicating women’s roles on screen.

Compared to the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems, it certainly harbours the same New York freneticism birthed in the lo-fi indie scene of the 2000s; and it is cut with the same succinct urban terror of Ronald Bronstein’s defining Frownland. However, If I Had Legs… demonstrates a radical internal perspective that is inherently feminist – using the camera as a means to create a stark feeling of otherness or unreality. It feels more rooted in the work of Virginia Woolf or Maya Deren at times than simply its mumblecore origins, evoking a feeling of a world, an apartment or a person split interdimensionally. 

It’s interesting to note also Bronstein’s decision to focus on the crutches of psychotherapy, meditation and recreational drugs – the whole film in so many ways is about perspective itself. The lack of collectivist empathy felt by Byrne’s character resonates with the history of hysteria and postnatal depression – and the sense that a woman who is unable to adopt traditional roles eventually becomes displaced in society. Metaphorically at times, perhaps obvious with its intentions, this feels a permissible stumble for a manifesto that wears its heart so brazenly on its sleeve. Bronstein reminds us again of the multifarious capacity of cinema – offering up a startling, unnerving work that refuses to be forgotten.