"Just describing the situation in which Linda (Rose Byrne) finds herself in Mary Bronstein's descent-into-hell motherhood drama If I Had Legs I'd Kick You is enough to provoke the state of heightened anxiety that the movie seeks to create in its audience. While her unhelpful husband (Christian Slater, mainly heard as a voice on the phone) is away on a long work trip, Linda finds herself single-parenting their chronically ill daughter (Delaney Quinn)."
"From the moment we meet Linda, she's not just on the verge of a nervous breakdown but well embarked on one. The rest of the film is a crescendo of misfortune that's as comical-how many lousy days in a row can this lady have?-as it is unsettling. The hole in the ceiling seems to expand, leaking goopy fluids like a festering wound."
Linda is a frazzled single mother caring for a chronically ill elementary-school daughter who remains mostly offscreen and unnamed, visible only in oblique glimpses. Her husband is away on a long work trip, and she manages nightly feedings via a feeding tube while holding a job as a therapist. A ceiling collapse floods their Montauk home and forces them into a shabby motel. Linda self-medicates with weed and alcohol, experiences skewed perceptions, and unloads anger onto her own therapist. She alienates well-meaning figures including a clinic doctor and the motel superintendent as misfortune escalates into a bleakly comic, unsettling downward spiral.
Read at Slate Magazine
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