Sometimes watching a movie can be the perfect way to unwind after a long day. You get comfortable on the couch and put on something lighthearted to chill out. But sometimes a movie seeks to give you the exact opposite of that experience, to stress you out or frustrate you to the point of a physical reaction. That was my experience with If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. 

Rose Byrne stars as Linda, a therapist who cares for her (mostly unseen) young daughter, who must be fed through a tube due to a medical condition, heavily implied to be a severe eating disorder. Linda is married but lives most of her life as a solo parent because her husband is frequently away for work. This means she’s solely responsible for every doctor’s appointment, every emotional outburst, every middle-of-the-night emergency, and every demand from her child.

It’s a lot to try to manage, and it’s made much worse when the ceiling in her apartment caves in, leaving a gigantic hole above her bed. She and her daughter are forced to move into a motel while she tries to get the landlord to repair it, and the state of disrepair and chaos starts to reflect Linda’s own life. 

She seeks help from her therapist (Conan O’Brien), but the process feels futile and sometimes downright awkward because it’s like a glimpse through the looking glass at how she handles her own clients. Each session serves as a stark reminder that nobody can just tell you what to do to solve all your problems when your life is crumbling around you.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is an incredibly stressful watch. Shot primarily in claustrophobic closeups, Linda’s life is like a cascade of little catastrophes that all start to add up. She’s both incredibly relatable and downright unlikable, perhaps a reflection of how awful we can be when we’re forced to carry an unsustainable emotional weight indefinitely. 

Byrne gives a remarkable performance, making Linda both sympathetic and sometimes repugnant. She’s selfish and unfeeling in a scene where she’s cold to hotel employee James (A$AP Rocky), but also selfless and constantly riddled with guilt about her daughter’s condition. She’s all the complexities and contradictions of motherhood rolled into one, and Byrne humanizes her in a way that reflects the multitudes of good and bad inside all of us.

Byrne’s powerhouse performance is complemented by the supporting cast, particularly Danielle Macdonald as Caroline, a patient whose overprotective fears about her newborn baby create an extra layer in the chaos of Linda’s world. Linda is simultaneously sympathetic to Caroline, annoyed by her, and even subtly jealous as events start to unfold later in the story.

Films can often make us laugh or cry, but very few are able to execute the goal of making us feel this uncomfortable. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is deeply upsetting on a level beyond horror or melodrama and more on par with the panic-inducing feeling of Uncut Gems or the disturbing grimness of Requiem for a Dream. It’s fucked up, and it wants you to feel fucked up and reflect on that feeling. 

It’s an incredibly impressive film, but one I don’t ever want to revisit. It’s very effective in its objectives with great execution from the style to the performances, but man, it is heavy. As someone at my press screening said about writer-director Mary Bronstein, “has anyone checked on her to make sure she’s okay?”