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IF I HAD LEGS, I’D KICK YOU
Manzler/Webb Screening Room
Wed, Nov 12, 2025 5:35 PM
Dir. Mary Bronstein | USA | 2025 | 113 min. | R | DCP
THIS SCREENING HAS OPEN CAPTIONS
Rose Byrne delivers one of the year’s great performances as Linda, a counsellor riding the edge of exhaustion as she attempts to navigate her child’s mysterious illness, her absent husband, a missing person, an increasingly hostile relationship with her therapist (Conan O’Brien, great in this role) and the calm support of a hotel employee (A$AP Rocky, also great), all as her Montauk home — and increasingly volatile psyche — begin to cave in. Forging a jagged path between darkest of comedy and the most harrowing of horrors — parenthood, as both are known — writer-director Mary Bronstein directs the f*** out of this film, placing the viewer fully on edge in this tour-de-force assault on the senses. Howard Ratner, meet Linda. “A virtuosic portrait of mental unraveling that uses every tool in the director’s arsenal to re-create an end-of-the-world feeling on the most intimate scale. Delivering a feverish, raw-nerve performance sure to go down as one of the year’s greats, Byrne has never had a role even remotely this intense to prepare us for the emotional acrobatics her writer-director has in store…. IF I HAD LEGS calls for next-level commitment from its star — and no small amount of schadenfreude from the audience.” —Peter Debruge, Variety
“It’s a towering performance, a feat of intelligence and energy that tightly binds to all of Bronstein’s heady, propulsive style. Let’s hope Byrne gets recognized for all of that hard work in some fashion, even if Linda never gets credit for hers.” —Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair
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