VIFF '25 | Deciphering If I Had Legs I'd Kick You Spoilers

After the movie, in the group chat, one of my friends said it was about the director's experience with postpartum depression. I'm still thinking about that.

If I Had Legs I'd Kick You. A baby kicks in the stomach. A baby takes time to develop their legs while in the womb. If I had legs…

Let's leave the cheese separating from the pizza for now…

The water in the apartment. Water breaking. Starts slow and then it explodes through the roof, falling down.

The hole opens. A massive hole in the home. A magical hole. A hole that seems to hold the secrets of the universe.

The hole opens and she must move. She must leave her home. She is outside of her safe space. Where she lives is not her home anymore. But the chord is still attached.

She learns about Reiki breathing. A way to, in a way, die without being dead. Or that's how James explains it. A way to cope. A way to disassociate. A way to leave her own body, her home.

The hole is not getting fixed. The people who were supposed to fix the hole are not doing their job.

There's separation. Linda is framed alone, most of the time. Her daughter is unseen. Her husband exists through the phone. Linda feels alone. Linda is alone.

The other mothers. Caroline and her horror stories of mothers who lost their minds and killed their children. The footage of women being interrogated by police. Footage that comes from after the horror is over.

Was Linda's child real? Was it about her letting go of her aborted baby? Or was it about her getting over postpartum depression after her daughter was born? She tells her therapist that she was pregnant twice, but the therapist scenes felt too bizarre to be real. They felt like dreams.

Discussions of dreams. Linda speaks of her dream where her therapist appears. Her patient dreams of kissing Linda (Linda is a therapist herself). Or rather, he dreams that Linda wants to kiss him. Romanticizing the person that is supposed to help you.

The parking attendant will not let Linda stop. She must keep moving. She cannot just sit in her car. She must either get out and go into the hospital, or drive off. There is no rest. No moment of respite. No time to gather one's thoughts.

Despite living in a motel, Linda continues to return to her home to look at the hole. She smokes weed there. She watches a movie where mothers eat their babies there. The mirror shatters and she cannot see herself. She whispers “Mom?” as little dancing lights manifest from the hole.

She leaves her child. She returns to her child. She leaves her child. She returns to her child. “Mother of the year,” as James calls her.

She drinks wine. A lot of wine. She smokes weed. She buys cocaine. Addiction easing the pain of depression, but not fixing the problem; not fixing the hole.

There is no surgery. There is no procedure. They just remove the tube by hand. The tube attached to her daughter. The tube that tethers Linda to her young one.

Nobody is helping Linda, but is Linda ready to accept help from anyone? She says to her therapist that she wants someone to tell her what to do, but her actions speak otherwise.

She sits in on a meeting for mothers about shame and guilt. She cannot sit for even a minute before she bursts out of the room. Linda accepts her blame. She's at fault. She's certain of it.

She won't listen to the other mothers because, at the end of the sobbing diatribes, she knows they will return to the realization that they are the ones to blame. She will not allow her burden to be lightened by outside forces.

Is nobody helping Linda, or is Linda not willing to accept anyone's help? The movie starts largely in closeup of her, implying that what we see is her vision of things. Is her therapist really inept, or is that Linda's interpretation?

The hamster. What of the hamster? A rabid maniac. A little demon from hell. Screams at her. Bites her. Gets run over by a car. A rodent, as Linda calls it. A failed experiment. An attempt to bribe her daughter. A hamster on a wheel. Rota Fortunae. Am I looking too far into the abyss?

From hamster roadkill, Mary Bronstein smash cuts to a closeup of lasagna. A food that is a close cousin to pizza. The daughter mentions on the phone with her dad that she ate a piece of cheese, and you can tell by her tone that she's proud. I rack my brain for answers but come up empty. Let's leave the lasagna for now…

Linda removes the tube by hand. She returns to her home to look at the hole, but her husband, Charles, is there and the hole is fixed. It's patched. A fresh coat of paint. Like it was never there.

To cut the chord. To fix herself.

The daughter cries and James comes to her aid. The releasing of the chord affects them both, while the hole fixed is just for Linda. For her to take care of herself, she must leave her daughter and this makes her daughter cry. There is no solution that would make everyone happy.

She returns to the beach. The last place she saw Caroline before she disappeared into blackness.

Linda rushes into the ocean. Ending the movie at the sea likes it's The 400 Blows. That ended with the child on the beach. This ends with Linda rushing to the water, getting annihilated by wave after wave. Until she's exhausted. Flat on her back. Gasping. We finally see the daughter. Linda promises that she will be better. A covenant with herself and with her daughter.

They are separated now. No tube keeping them attached. No hole that must be fixed. The home is restored. The anxiety is over. There's nothing left to do but go on.