Rose Byrne is already receiving awards buzz for her leading role as a spiralling mother in Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. The film premiered at the 2025 Berlinale, where Byrne was awarded the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance, and opened the 2025 Melbourne International Film Festival. Byrne plays Linda, a mother who is struggling to raise her sick child while balancing her own work and relationships. With suffocating (positive) camera work and tensions rising until the very end, Bronstein’s film is sure to have all mothers, in some way, relating to Linda’s experiences.

When her ceiling falls in and a hole forms in her apartment roof, Linda and her terminally ill daughter move into a motel. As they live in the motel, Linda struggles to help her child eat, while butting heads with her husband and her child’s healthcare providers on their daughter’s treatment plans, as well as trying to get the hole fixed, all at the same time working full time as a therapist. It’s a lot for anyone. For Linda, if the hole wasn’t her breaking point, then the laundry list of things to come after most definitely might be.

You can’t speak about If I Had Legs I’d Kick You without immediately discussing Rose Byrne’s career best performance. There is rarely a shot she is not in, aligning us fully with Linda and allowing Byrne’s expressions and reactions to everything around her take centre stage. She captures the difficulties that Linda is experiencing, portraying Linda with a care and understanding around being a mother experiencing raising a child in her circumstances.

There is a stunning use of the camera throughout the film, which often feels like it is almost exclusively shot in close ups. Mainly of faces, and mainly of Linda, this use of camera makes us feel suffocated since the beginning. We keep waiting or the film the zoom out, to show us the world around Linda. But as the film goes on, the camera remains close. The few shots we do see that are wide or long feel like breaths of fresh air, but we are always quickly thrown back into the close-ups, with no time to readjust to a world outside of Linda. This does make the film feel quite exhausting to watch very early on, but this proves that this works to drive home the point of understanding Linda’s suffocating experience being a mother.

As a result of this camera work, as well as the story beginning with the hole in the ceiling and what feels like Linda’s breaking point, I had some slight issues with the pacing of the film. Since we begin with feeling like Linda is already in the worst place she can be, the film does slightly start to feel monotonous by the time the end is reached. But again, this feeling of wanting the film to end so we can escape the trapped feeling that Linda feels also works in the films favour, so maybe we should be feeling this way by the end of the marathon that is a few weeks in Linda’s life.

There will be obvious comparisons to Lynch’s Eraserhead, surreal at times and mysterious, as any images of Linda’s ill daughter are kept from us. We hear her voice, but fail to see anything more that his throughout the film. Though her look is the least important thing to the film and Linda’s experience, this further works to build tension, as we begin to almost feel a fear about how sick the daughter is. But this once again further’s the centre of the film that is Linda, focussing on her experience as a mother, and her as a whole character, rather than just a mother of the sick child she is always in shot with. There will also be comparisons to the Safdie Brother’s Uncut Gems, as Bernstein expertly crafts tension throughout the film as Linda spirals downwards.

It is obvious why Rose Byrne is receiving high praise for her role as spiralling mother Linda in Rose Bernstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. With claustrophobic visuals that work to make us feel as suffocated as Linda, as well as a stellar lead performance from Byrne who occupies almost every shot of the film, Bernstein’s sophomore film is labelled as a dark-comedy-drama but oftentimes feels more like a horror film for mothers and women alike.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You was screened at the 2025 Melbourne International Film Festival and will be released in theatres on October 10, 2025.