In 2025, an unlikeable mother still feels a little risky. Certain types of female selfishness and honesty can be hard for audiences to stomach. Just take a look at the deeply polarized reactions to Miranda July’s All Fours for proof. At its core, it’s about how far you might go to have one thing be wholly and completely your own, but its protagonist is borderline despised by anyone who doesn’t understand her. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You wanders boldly into the same waters.

It’s a film that leads us into motherhood’s true heart of darkness, asking questions and sharing thoughts polite society suggests are better kept to oneself. The tough, difficult, and complicated mother has become a trope. Think Mare of Easttown. The sloppy, chaotic, angry, and judgmental mother that loves her kids and her family, goddammit. She’s just doing her best.

But If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a movie about motherhood that doesn’t give a fuck about the family. It is not a movie about relationships or daughters or marriages. Yes, it’s a movie about a mother—one mother in particular—and motherhood at large. But only in the way that being a mother affects the mother herself.

Writer and director Mary Bronstein sucks us inside Linda’s (Rose Byrne) head and pins us there as she deals with her seriously ill daughter and a gaping hole that explodes in her bedroom ceiling. Her husband is, of course, away on business for weeks on end. That leaves Linda to live out of a rundown motel while managing her daughter’s illness, overseeing the apartment’s repairs, caring for the clients in her therapy practice, and begging for scraps of compassion from her own therapist (Conan O’Brien). From minute one, it’s obvious she’s hanging on by a thread.

The premise itself might fool you into thinking it’s not that different than any other story about an overburdened mom, but If I Had Legs has teeth. Linda’s husband only exists as a voice on the phone that she’s constantly hanging up on. Strikingly, we never see her daughter. We don’t even know her name. Her presence is constant, her crying and whining persistent, but relegated to disembodiment. A close-up of an ear here. A bellybutton there. Maybe a foot. That’s all we see of her.

Bronstein knows that if we see them, we’ll get distracted. She does not want us distracted. Instead, she zeroes in on extreme close-ups of Linda, showing the lines of her face and the glassiness of her eyes when she’s trying for the thousandth time not to cry. The camera cradles her face in its hands the way Linda so clearly wishes someone, anyone, would. It keeps us close to her rage, frustration, and desperation, with Byrne giving an all-out, knock-em-down-dead performance that’s absolutely unforgettable.

The film is practically begging you to hate Linda’s family, or at least to understand why Linda might sometimes. A husband who’s never there and still thinks he knows best. A kid with absolutely suffocating, never-ending needs and wants. By keeping Linda’s daughter at the greatest distance possible, it frees us up to identify with Linda’s worst thoughts and impulses. When she leaves her sleeping daughter alone in the motel room to drink wine on a park bench? Shit, can you blame her? Instead of judging her, it’s so much easier to see what she’s actually grasping for: a minute of peace, an escape from her own inner critics, a chance to breathe.

This isn’t to say the film is eager to condone all of Linda’s choices. Many are objectively terrible. No, it’s about understanding why a person desperate to do their best might end up making those choices anyway. The world is full of people doing their best and unable to reckon with the ways their best just simply isn’t very good. Why not accept that some of those people are mothers?

Bronstein’s film makes it obvious there’s a hole in Linda’s being as big as the one in her ceiling. Voids follow her throughout, and If I Had Legs’s excellent use of sound design lets you hear it as well as feel it. The sonic backdrop is one of nothingness. Whirring, droning, buzzing, static — they all scream loud enough to let you know what a hole in your heart might sound like. It’s not pure silence, but the constant hum that makes it impossible to forget that something is missing. Ironically, this deft work by sound designers Ruy García and Filipe Messeder lets you completely forget that there’s no traditional score. How fitting that for Linda in this moment, it’s a world with no music. At least save for whatever she can play in fits and starts on her smartphone’s speaker during her midnight park sits.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is the kind of bold and biting honesty you feel lucky to stumble across. It’s a movie that’s not afraid to show you a mother you’d hate. Then, its incredible magic makes it impossible to do so.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You screams into theatres October 10 in limited release. Then it crashes through the ceiling October 24 in wide release.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You Trailer: