Being a parent is hard. Yes, and water is wet, but despite the self-evident nature of that observation, perhaps those of us without spawn don’t give enough credit to just how emotionally, financially, and mentally taxing it is to be responsible for not just your own life but someone else’s. This hardship becomes exponentially more insurmountable when someone with persistent mental health issues becomes a parent. Even if you’re relatively well-adjusted, the prospect of having your entire method for handling daily life (something that most of us never feel we fully have a handle on in the first place) upended, your workload essentially doubled.

Lots of films (not to mention novels, plays, and even songs) have been made about how tricky navigating the world of parenting can be. Yet fewer have been made about the mental state that having too much responsibility can put you into. Even if you’re not a parent, the deluge of Content in our modern way of living can allow you to relate to this; it’s far too easy to feel like you’re drowning in problems, and it’s disturbingly possible that, despite your best efforts, those problems may only compound instead of go away.

Writer-director Mary Bronstein’s “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” captures this hectic, absurdist, horrifically anxious state of mind, and then some. It’s an experiential character study of Linda, a mother in trouble, and she’s played with exceptional skill by Rose Byrne. While Byrne’s performance is the anchor around which the entire film orbits, it’s impressive how Bronstein is able to capture and sustain this much anxiety for a feature-length film without losing her tight grasp on the film’s pace and material. Bronstein employs surrealism along with slice-of-life immediacy, as well as includes a surprisingly quirky ensemble cast without ever letting the movie, unlike Linda herself, fall apart.

“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” begins building its tapestry of anxiety right away, introducing us to Linda as she is already struggling to maintain the care of her Child (Delaney Quinn), who is suffering from an unnamed illness and eating disorder that requires her to be fed through a tube in her stomach. Linda is trying to balance a number of spinning plates — watching her Child, dealing with the Child’s doctor, Dr. Spring (played by Bronstein herself), who has genuine concerns regarding Linda’s mental state, keeping up her own job as a therapist, going to therapy herself (which is conducted by her distant colleague, played by Conan O’Brien), all while her husband is absent on some extended work trip or vacation, which is likely some combination of both.

That’s when, one fine evening, a pipe in Linda’s apartment bursts, which causes the entire apartment to be flooded with water, and a ghastly hole to be formed in the ceiling. Linda is forced (or at least feels forced by her inept and lazy landlord and the repair crews he hires) to move herself and her Child into a seedy beachside motel. Once there, Linda struggles with a rude clerk, Diana (Ivy Wolk), a persistently nosy guest, James (A$AP Rocky), and her own issues with alcoholism and the continual desire to literally walk away from her problems. As Bronstein states in the film’s official press kit, her aim with the film was “to capture the visceral feeling of that desperate mental state where you fear everything is not only falling apart, but that the falling apart is all your fault.”

Not only does “Legs” achieve that goal, but it is one of the most anxiety-inducing films in recent memory. It easily clears the last holder of that title, “Uncut Gems,” which is ironic given that movie’s co-director Josh Safdie is a producer here. Unlike “Gems,” the continual mounting tension and encroaching anxiety in “Legs” feels far more relatable and complex. Where the lead character of “Gems” was essentially the source from which all his issues stemmed, it’s not so cut-and-dried to say that Linda is solely responsible for her plight; as Bronstein mentioned in her statement, it only feels like she might be at fault, which is somehow worse. Many of us feel our lives are out of our control, that daily living is one endless game of playing Whack-a-Mole with issues that pop up. “Legs” compounds and crystalizes that sensation, making it pure and unadulterated.

The film may be described as “Uncut Gems” for moms, but that wouldn’t give the richness of the movie’s horror roots its due. The cinematography (courtesy of DoP Christopher Messina) and the intricate sound design (by Filipe Messeder) push the movie into the realm of horror, with shots framed uncomfortably close and sounds attacking the listener from every direction. For the majority of the film, both Linda’s Child and Husband exist only as voices — this way, they’re almost not individuals, but banshee-like creatures who continually torment Linda’s every waking moment. The choice recalls Jennifer Kent’s “The Babadook,” another horror film about the mounting pressures of parenthood.

What Bronstein’s film recalls most of all is David Lynch’s “Eraserhead,” especially with her penchant for utilizing surrealist imagery at certain points in the movie. Like “Eraserhead,” “Legs” concerns a parent who isn’t at all sure whether she wanted to be a parent in the first place, and every bit of terror and hardship in her life is consolidated in that big hole in her apartment ceiling, a place which the camera delves into and finds an ominous Void there. While these surrealist moments are thematically relevant, Bronstein can’t quite find a way to elegantly blend them into Linda’s experience so that they feel as truthful as the rest of the film; they’re gilding the lily a bit too much.

Much more successful is the existential terror introduced when one of Linda’s patients, Caroline (Danielle Macdonald), goes missing. A new parent, Caroline is introduced as overprotective of her child, which makes her possible abandonment even more baffling and upsetting. It’s an element that Bronstein uses to tie in aspects of real-life cases of unfit (or at least unstable) mothers, lending some additional, eerie validity to Linda’s experiences.

As Bronstein explained in her introduction to the film during its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, she wanted to make an “experiential” movie, and that’s precisely what “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” is. This means that the film has a lot of rough edges which are either deliberately ambiguous or frustrating; don’t look for resolution here. Although the movie has the power to leave you incredibly shaken by the finale, for others, it may seem to not go far enough, its plot elements just too elliptical for their taste. The most undeniably successful aspect of the movie is Byrne’s performance — the film belongs to her completely, and she carries off every single scene with high-wire panache.

Where “Legs” shines most, though, is not in presenting a warts-and-all portrait of a flawed woman, nor a well-rounded look at the hardships of parenting, but rather in its absurdist take on the anxieties of life. The casting of O’Brien and Rocky are two strokes of genius — there’s something so delicious about seeing famous faces like theirs either disturbingly play against type (in O’Brien’s case) or be a voice of reason in Linda’s increasingly outré existence (in Rocky’s case). For me personally, the film had such a profound absurdist effect, blending some beloved actors of mine with hardwired traumatic memories of my past, those involving the sounds of Child’s self-run IV feeding system. To those of us who might rather laugh than cry at the daily pressures of the real world, “Legs” is almost a comfort film. This tension within the film itself is best summed up by the title itself, a deliberately obscure phrase which seems to imply a cry for help and a threat. Whether “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” leaves you riled up or soothed is up to you, though it’s probably a good litmus test for your own mental state and the way you approach life. 

Being a parent is hard, and not all of us have that responsibility. However, if the sentiment “it takes a village to raise a child” has any truth to it, then maybe none of us can truly escape that hardship. Ideally, we should all look out for each other, but how can we when the wounds are this fresh, and the void is so deep? The film has its rough edges, but when it comes to exploring and emulating these thoughts, it’s truly a movie with legs.

/Film Rating: 8 out of 10

“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. It will be released later this year.