If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025) – Rosy

Released: 7th August 2025
Seen: 27th February 2026

We all know the famous phrase “Life’s a bitch, and then you die”. That phrase feels more relevant today than ever, where everything just feels constantly overwhelming. Burnout is real and is not only happening in people’s professional lives but in their personal ones. Day-to-day events just pile up in a way that feels insurmountable and unfixable because the people who could fix them are unavailable. That’s a feeling that we’ve all had before and it’s the kind of emotional destruction that could make for a fascinating film, or at least a fascinating performance, and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is fortunately both of those things.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You follows therapist Linda (Rose Byrne), a mom who is pushed to her breaking point by the situation she finds herself in. First, she’s unable to get any sleep due to the machine that her daughter is hooked up to that feeds her at night, then there’s the fact that her apartment has a giant hole in the floor which leads to flooding and the landlord refuses to repair it in a timely manner (because landlords are fucking bastards). She’s also being constantly belittled by her daughter’s doctor, her husband, a guy who runs the parking lot at the hospital and even her own therapist, all of which slowly starts chipping away at her mentally until she finally has a complete nervous breakdown.

While the film is presented as a dark comedy (and I do mean dark, the only comedy I’ve seen in recent years that was darker than this was The Coffee Table), what If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is in reality is watching a two-hour panic attack as performed by Rose Byrne. It’s a slow, exhausting descent where every single time the main character reaches to try and grab onto something that might help her stay afloat, we watch as she’s pushed back down by the world until any human being would just give up. It’s almost a perfect depiction of how stress can break you, it’s not one big event but a thousand little ones that weaken you until there’s nothing left. Sure everything is heightened for dramatic purposes but anyone who has felt the mental weight of burnout will feel seen by what goes on here.

The feeling of panic and overwhelming stress is amplified by how If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is presented, namely by almost exclusively keeping the camera on Rose Byrne’s face the entire film. Sure there are occasional cutaways to other people she’s speaking to but only when absolutely essential. Entire conversations will happen and we only stay on Rose, every scene involving her daughter is shot in a way where we don’t see the daughter’s face because we’re just locked on our lead. It’s to a point where it’s noticeable, the film throws away the standard “Shot-reverse shot” style of filming a conversation for a lot of the runtime because that would give the audience a moment to breathe and this film doesn’t want you to breathe, it wants you to feel uneasy at all times that something is horribly wrong and you cannot fix it.

What’s fascinating is that all the problems that our main character deals with are not end of the world things, these are all fixable events that could be handled (A hole in the floor can be fixed, a child can gain weight, a patient can be postponed) but when they’re all happening at once and no one’s seeming to help, it feels insurmountable. Every new thing puts a new weight on the shoulders of the main character that only brings her down more and more. It’s not like just one big issue, the story isn’t building to some climax where she can fix everything all at once by doing one specific thing. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You shows the raw reality of how it can feel impossible to get out from the weight of the daily grind, especially when one of the things that’s weighing you down is the health of your own child which you can’t do a thing about because the doctors won’t help. It’s almost brutal in its honesty and willingness to go to some dark places.

All of this works because of Rose Byrne, it honestly makes sense why she’s the lone Oscar nominee that If I Had Legs I’d Kick You has. The film hyperfocusses on her, for the first several minutes it barely shows anything other than her face and she makes damn sure to take full advantage of that. The camera’s unending desire to always be within about three feet of Rose allows her to create one of the most intimate performances that we’ve seen in a while. Her ability to say so much with just the way her eyes move is incredible. You can feel the pain bubbling underneath the surface, every desperate attempt to pull back some of the anger that’s about to explode out of her at any second. It’s the kind of performance that practically screams “Give me an Oscar nomination”, and thank goodness they did.

The reason they probably didn’t give everything else a nomination is because, despite the praise I have given this film, it’s undeniably polarising. Its style goes outside the norm in a way that isn’t obviously stylised so it can just feel off, at times it’s hard to engage with. The main character is understandable but rarely likable and… well, there’s only so much child screaming you can listen to in the background before you kind of get annoyed. It’s all still very well done but you can get how this wasn’t an Oscar darling this year, except for Rose Byrne who is omnipresent throughout If I Had Legs I’d Kick You to a degree that no other actress is. It’s not gonna be a film for everybody, it’s not an easily accessible dramedy but it is an intense and well made one.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick you puts all of its eggs in the basket held by its lead and fortunately for the film, she can carry them all. Very few films truly rely on the performance of a single actor to this extent, this one absolutely does to the point where it can relegate major characters and plotlines to a voice on a phone. If you’re into something a little off-centre, then this is worth looking into, if nothing else you’ll understand why Rose Byrne got her nomination for this year’s Oscar… she probably won’t win, but at least now the nomination will make sense.