If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Play Trailer

Trailer

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

Sat
25
Sat 25 Oct 6:00 PM

The Regal Theatre
General Admission
Unclassified 18+
113 Mins
October
Fri 17 Oct

Sat 25 Oct

Premiering at Sundance, then the buzziest title at Berlin, Rose Byrne is astonishing in this darkly comic A24 title about a working mother hanging on by the barest thread.

Therapist Linda’s 10-year-old daughter has some mysterious illness, is being fed by tube and requires constant care. At the same time Linda’s husband is away and then the house floods causing a surreal hole in the ceiling. Mother and daughter (who you never see) then move to a motel.

At the motel, Linda becomes on talking terms with the guy (A$AP Rocky) in the room next door and quickly sinks into a state of adolescent resistance – drinking, smoking and disappearing for a bit while fighting with her analyst (Conan O’Brien), who may be operating as a father figure in this scenario.

Shot in close-up with limited if no establishing shots to provide perspective and a brilliant, unsettling sound design, we are living in Linda’s pressure cooker life. Nothing may ever have really captured the intensity of motherhood quite like this film – the clawing need of a child represented brilliantly by a disembodied voice coming from below. You really feel for Linda and just want that child’s voice to go away.