Rarely, if at all, does If I Had Legs I’d Kick You provide a moment to breathe. That overwhelming, excruciating claustrophobia is present from the very outset, when struggling mother Linda (Rose Byrne) is captured in the most extreme of extreme close-ups—where every stress-induced fracture lining her face is visible.  

Bronstein’s triumphant return to filmmaking has been a long time coming. It’s been close to two decades since the director’s debut Yeast, co-starring Bronstein and Greta Gerwig as a pair of friends on a tense camping trip. Audiences—often male—found it abrasive, and Bronstein remembers the way that they observed the film with their walls up and reinforced with crossed arms. “Now as an older person, I can look back and say it was a gift in a way,” the director reflects. “I’m actually doing something that is completely different and, and it doesn’t matter if it’s not for everyone, because a movie that’s for everyone is for no one.”

With If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, she doubles down on the discomfort. Byrne’s Linda walks a tightrope stretched so taut that it threatens to snap—pinballing from appointments with her therapy patients, to tending to her ill child’s needs at all hours, to scoping out drugs on the dark web. The ceiling of her rickety apartment collapsing is just the beginning of the unrelenting trials that she shoulders everyday.

Carrying all of that weight is Byrne, who gravitated towards the moments of levity just as readily as the chaos. “My adrenaline was so high during it, I just did not want to mess it up,” she says. From the moment she first met Bronstein, Byrne felt that they were aligned on who Linda was, refining the character through extensive rehearsals. “I was in constant conversation, we were in lockstep. I felt like we were just so protective of this character. Just trying to find as many colours as we could.”

In between screenings at the London Film Festival, Bronstein and Byrne speak to A Rabbit’s Foot about the film’s complicated relationship with therapy, and bringing the sensation of stress alive on screen.

Iana Murray: Have you had a particularly interesting interpretation from the audience?

Mary Bronstein: I’ve had some interpretations where they feel like nothing is real in the movie. It’s all in her mind. I make the choice to not show the daughter, and then people think that the daughter doesn’t exist. But I love that kind of stuff, because one of my biggest filmmaking idols is David Lynch, and his whole thing is any interpretation that you have cannot be wrong. I think this movie invites that because it doesn’t hold your hand, and it asks a lot more questions than it gives answers. It invites interesting interpretations, which are so exciting to me.

Rose Byrne: Last night, this young woman said, “I [was] scared to see this movie. I want to be a parent.” And she said it was the opposite. “This movie has made me understand parenting and I still want to do it.” And Mary was like, “Well, no one’s had that response before, that’s amazing!” 

Iana Murray: Mary, you took a long break between films. Did your decision to make this film come from you having the idea for it, or did you just come to a place where you realised that this is what you wanted to do again?

Mary Bronstein: I think both. It really started from a place of an—I mean this in the truest sense of the term—existential crisis, feeling like I was disappearing. The very seed of the idea of the movie comes from a real life experience of my daughter being very ill. And I really felt myself disappearing into that task. And I started to feel like I didn’t know who I was. It was almost like when they talk about an ego death. They usually talk about that in terms of drugs. It was like having a K-hole experience, but without the drug. And it brought me to a place where I realised what I am is a storyteller and a filmmaker. I was in a situation where I racked my brain: Is there a film that expresses this thing, or reflects my experience that I’m having right now? I could not think of one. There’s other films that have elements, but nothing like this. I had something to say, and so that was also the big kick in the ass.

Iana Murray: We’re in a culture right now that really places such importance in therapy and this idea that you need to have a therapist if you want to be a regulated person. I thought it was so fascinating that this film was saying even therapy has its limits.

Rose Byrne: In the world of the film, the relationship with Linda and the therapist, it’s sort of the love story in the movie. The bitter end of this relationship, the breakup. And when he does break up with her, when he finishes it, that’s, that’s the end of the book. After that, she completely unravels. That’s when she becomes like a zombie teenager. 

Mary Bronstein: There’s a tradition of therapy in movies and television. There’s a trope that it’s always about some kind of personal breakthrough, and the therapist is very involved and very approachable. That can happen in therapy, but what I was trying to capture is how therapy sometimes feels, which is that there can be a hurtful moment when you discover that, oh, this is a one-sided relationship. And in the movie Rose’s character struggles with that and is trying to make herself special to this therapist who’s not having it. It’s a love story where we’re meeting the couple at the bitter end. And one of the things, having studied psychology, is that it’s a hard moment for everybody involved. The idea of therapy is that you’re not meant to be in therapy forever, so there is a goodbye, there is a break-up. That’s what I wanted to do: show what it really feels like and the frustration, instead of this fantasy of a cuddly Judd Hirsch in a cardigan.

Iana Murray: Linda really has to compartmentalise herself depending on who she’s around. Rose, did you have to compartmentalise your performance in the same way? It feels like you’re playing five different people in one movie. 

Rose Byrne: I feel like in life we have different roles. We all compartmentalise. That’s just being a person. When you’re playing a therapist, it’s such a role you’re playing in somebody’s life that it’s like when you see your teacher outside of school, and it’s so weird that they exist. But I felt like there’s such humour in that too, because she’s in this position of giving people advice when she’s so clearly making such dreadful decisions. I love Mary positing these kinds of ideas throughout, and shooting it felt like chapters: the therapist chapter, the hotel chapter.

Mary Bronstein: Even when she goes to her apartment and she’s alone and the baby monitor is not getting reception, she’s not herself. She’s always escaping in her mind, or she’s tethered to other people. It was very much in the preparation I did with Rose, where we really became obsessed with who this woman is outside of the story. We don’t have a lot of backstory information, but Rose and I did all that work, and Rose was very interested in who this woman was before. Not even just before the story starts, but before she had a kid. When she was a teenager, what was her relationship like with her mom? Those were not things that I had thought about when I was writing. One of the things we did that I think is the most fun is we made a playlist, and when I showed the playlist to Rose, she was like, “Oh, Linda was cool.” And then one of my favourite things is that towards the end of the movie, she’s wearing a band t-shirt that gives you a clue into [who she is] when she’s stripped down from everything. What does she put on? She puts on a Janis Joplin t-shirt. And that’s actually a t- shirt that was mine from when I was 14 years old. I still had it—filled with holes and everything.

Iana Murray: Mary, so many people have focused on the motherhood aspect of the film, whereas you’ve talked about creating this feeling of the universe piling on top of you. Was that the starting point for the story? 

Mary Bronstein: The centre of the movie, for me, is trauma and the idea that you can physically escape, but trauma lives inside of you. No matter where you go, it’s gonna get you. And to me, that’s more terrifying than the idea of a man in a movie chasing someone with a knife. That is terrifying, but this is an existential kind of terror. She’s not the monster but it’s inside of her and it does get her. The other thing is that the type of motherhood that she’s experiencing is a very small percentage of mothers’ experience—which is having a critically ill child. But I think it has to be recognised that one of the things that is messing her up so bad is, like, why don’t I just get to be a regular mother? I didn’t sign up for this. That’s something that’s not expressed readily, because it feels like a betrayal to your child, but it’s okay to express that. And I think that’s also what I was trying to do in the movie: it’s okay to say, “This isn’t fair.” If you are stressed, you do feel like every single thing in the world is conspiring against you.

Iana Murray: I’m not the first person to say that I felt stressed watching this film. Rose, in playing Linda, did you feel like you were internalising that stress as well?

Rose Byrne: We’re dropped into this situation without any information, right? The trap with this sort of character is that it’s not nuanced and it’s one-note—screaming into the ether. [My] mindset was how do we bring all of the nuance of this? How do we start here, and where do we go? [When] it starts, she’s already in the crisis, and we don’t know how long they’ve been in this programme. I just wanted to keep all of the possibilities alive for each scene. For me, trying to find the humour is a huge thing for me, because it comes from the same place. The higher the stakes are, the funnier it can be. I know it sounds demented, because it’s obviously a really heavy subject matter, but it’s a testament to Mary. She has these wonderful opportunities in there.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is in UK cinemas from Friday 20th February.