The most disturbing psychological thriller of 2025 is rocketing up the streaming charts

Watch it on HBO Max... if you dare

The first movie I saw Rose Byrne in was 2011’s Bridesmaids, a comedy best known for its extended diarrhea joke. In the years since, the Australian actress has had a varied, impressive career, but whenever I saw her onscreen it was typically opposite Seth Rogen in either the Neighbors franchise or Apple TV’s Platonic series. So when Byrne started showing up in trailers for what looked like a dark comedy about parenting (opposite Conan O’Brien, no less) I expected a slight deviation from her usual Judd Apatow-style high jinks.

Instead, A24’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a startlingly unrelenting movie that isn't quite horror, but feels like something far more oppressive. This story of a mother driven to the brink of madness is an incredibly difficult watch. It’s also currently rocketing up the streaming charts after landing on HBO Max on Jan. 30, and it’s worth checking out if you can stomach the stress.

Released in October 2025, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You stars Byrne as Linda, the struggling mother of a very sick child suffering from a feeding disorder. Linda’s husband (Christian Slater) barely appears on screen, but berates her frequently over the phone for her faults as a parent. Linda’s life is falling apart: A pipe in her apartment bursts and her ceiling caves in, forcing her to live in a seedy motel. Her job as a therapist is a nightmarish procession of obsessive patients desperate for her attention, and her daughter is constantly shrieking things like, “Are we going to die.” Eventually, Linda begins to break from reality, experiencing dark hallucinations and acting increasingly reckless with both her own life and her daughter’s.

Writer-director Mary Bronstein builds tension from the opening seconds of the movie, but her smartest (and most devious) choice is to focus the camera primarily on Byrne. A large chunk of the 114-minute runtime is spent staring directly at the protagonist’s face as it contorts into various stressed-out expressions. Meanwhile, Bronstein keeps Linda’s daughter (Delaney Quinn) offscreen, instead just giving us the occasional odd angle that emphasizes the feeding tube surgically attached to the young girl’s stomach without revealing her face. The daughter’s disembodied voice punctuates the film incessantly with endless nagging and terrified screams. It's perhaps the most stressful movie I’ve ever watched — and that’s before one particularly traumatic scene involving a panicked pet hamster.

In an interview with NPR, Bronstein explained how focusing the camera on Byrne emphasizes the character’s intense sense of isolation, while also forcing the audience to experience the story from Linda’s perspective. “I'm using the close-up to highlight the isolation, and also to really say to the audience, ‘I'm putting you in this woman's reality, and that's the only reality that you have,’” the director said. “We can't reality check against her. We have to radically accept what she's experiencing.”

Speaking to The Times, Byrne took it one step further. By keeping Linda’s daughter off screen, the director limits any instinctive sympathy we might feel for the poor child.

“Mary [Bronstein] forces you to stay with the mother, because if you see the child, your empathy will go with the child, as it should, as we’re programmed to,” Byrne says. “Linda also can’t really see her child, which can happen in parenting. Because [the stress she’s under] is relentless, because it is unending, [your children] lose their shape a little bit. And you have to remind yourself, Wow, this is a tiny little person. That’s totally an experience I’ve had as a parent, and there is shame you feel around that.”

That’s the scariest and most disturbing part of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Even as Bronstein drags the audience deeper into Linda’s insanity, and Byrne’s performance takes on the high-pitched, unsettling intensity of a dentist's drill, there’s no escape and no release — only the pitch black darkness of a desperate single mother on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

I can’t say I enjoyed this movie, but I did find it fascinating and extremely well made. And Byrne undoubtedly deserves the Golden Globe she won for her performance (although submitting the movie into the “Musical or Comedy” should be a crime). If the descriptions you’ve just read of a movie about the psychological horrors of parenting sound intriguing, give If I Had Legs I’d Kick You a shot. If not, there’s no shame in sitting this one out.

After all, you can always rewatch Bridesmaids instead.

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If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is streaming on HBO Max and available to rent digitally from all the usual places.