If I Had Legs I'd Kick You - A24

It’s easy to understand why we’re drawn to stories about madness. We’ve all felt like we’re going mad, at some point, and maybe many of us have. Some of us have made it through the other end, but sadly, some of us have not. Our mental health is such a fragile, tenuous thing—we can do everything right, and due to forces beyond our control, we can lose our grasp on reality.

But what is it about stories about women being driven mad that people love so much? Maybe it’s because of the forces that drive women to insanity. In stories about men who lose their minds, there’s usually some specific wrong that they can’t wrap their heads around, some tangible injustice that they want to rectify, although they go about it the completely wrong way. Whether it’s Travis Bickle or D-FENS, they’re monsters that the world has created through its cruelty and indifference. But, in the case of Linda (Rose Byrne) in If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, there’s no specific, singular focus that causes her to unravel. It’s the world, as a whole, in all its minutiae, on every scale from large to small, that beats her down, day after day.

First, there’s her daughter, who remains just off camera, who has an unspecified illness that requires a feeding tube. While dealing with the stress of struggling with her everyday work-related stress and her daughter’s medical issues, a massive hole opens up in the ceiling of her apartment, flooding it with rancid water. She has to move, temporarily, into a dingy motel as the management for her building is in no rush to help make the repairs so she can have some semblance of normalcy in her living situation.

During a therapy session, Linda tries to tell her therapist (Conan O’Brien) about a dream she had about him, and he’s not interested. He doesn’t seem to have patience for discussions about dreams she had. She seems hurt by his dismissal. Later, we find that Linda is also a therapist, and when one of her own patients tries to tell her about a dream they had, she brushes it off with the same disinterest. It’s clear, at this point, that much of what we witness is filtered through Linda’s perspective and perception. Is every person she encounters really such a bad person, or does she simply perceive them that way because of the stress weighing on her mental health?

Like Linda, I’ve had issues with my mental health in the past. And like Linda, too, I’ve found comfort in drugs that can give a temporary relief in the moment, only for the next day to make everything just a little bit worse - until you up the amount, causing the cycle to spin out of control. I’m just glad I got this movie to review a few days later, when I had a gaping hole in my living room from a plumbing issue that required a plumber to jackhammer their way into my pipes. Otherwise, the parallels between my life and the film might feel a bit too on-the-nose.

Vital Disc Stats: The Blu-ray
If I Had Legs I'd Kick You makes its debut on Blu-ray in a single-disc release. Like most A24 releases, the single disc is housed in a unique case, enveloped by a removable slipcover that opens up to a pocket on the left-hand side containing six postcards with photography by Logan White.

For its Blu-ray release, If I Had Legs I'd Kick You is presented in 1080p high-definition video. As of this writing, it is available in 4K/Dolby Vision on HBO Max, and for comparison, I toggled back and forth between the two versions. And even though this disc is “only” in HD/SDR, for sheer bitrate, it comes ahead as the clear winner. Perhaps the 4K version is more color-accurate, with better black levels, but the amount of detail on the physical release gives it the edge, with each individual shot containing more data.

If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, regardless of format, is a good-looking film that embraces a cooler color palette, contrasted against certain nighttime shots that are overwhelmed with an artificial, intrusive amber light that feels like an invader against the comforting darkness of the evening. Much of the film is shot in extreme close-up, in an extra-wide presentation that almost feels like a twist on the filmic language coined by Sergio Leone in his spaghetti westerns.

The Dolby Atmos mix for If I Had Legs I'd Kick You is a subtle masterwork. At first, it begins with slight tweaks to what we know about traditional sound design—namely, that in many of the sequences shot in extreme close-up of Linda, dialogue is not merely contained to the center channel. Dialogue cues will ping the front-left or front-right channels instead, indicating where the offscreen character stands in relation to our focus. Hallucinatory interludes, where Linda divorces herself from the current moment, take full advantage of the 3D soundscape, as effects swim from the front of the soundstage, the upper tops, rear tops, and bounce back and forth between the two rear satellite channels. For a movie that isn’t a traditional action-packed narrative, its sound design is just as free and boundless as any summer blockbuster.

For a recent film release, and not through a boutique label, If I Had Legs I'd Kick You has a pretty decent offering of supplements, featuring an audio commentary, a pair of featurettes, and over twenty minutes' worth of deleted/extended scenes.

• Audio Commentary - Writer/director Mary Bronstein and D.P. Christopher Messina
• Behind-the-Scenes (HD 7:48) - Featurette
• Evolution of a Tracking Shot (HD 3:48) - Featurette
• Deleted and Extended Scenes (HD 21:31)

If I Had Legs I'd Kick You is not for casual viewing. It’s a challenging, difficult work that explores the fragility of mental health through a narrative that sometimes blurs the line between reality and insanity, with some Cronenbergian body horror thrown in for good measure. Rose Byrne is terrific in the lead, and since so much of the film is told in close-up, she conveys a lot of emotion through facial expressions that hint at something boiling just beneath the surface. The film looks and sounds great, with a decent offering of supplements that give an inside look into how the sausage is made. If I Had Legs I'd Kick You is Highly Recommended.