It’s rare that two movies are both released around the same time and have profoundly interesting things to say about similar subjects. Yes, we got lucky in 1997 when Volcano and Dante’s Peak arrived in the same calendar year, or even better, in 1998 when Hollywood bestowed upon us the end-of-the-world shenanigans of Deep Impact and Armageddon. If there’s anything a studio head loves, it’s an idea that someone else already spent money on.
Both Die My Love and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You are fundamentally two hilariously tragic and brutally funny movies about motherhood, but instead of playing like twin films, they play like two visionary filmmakers were separately inspired to tell stories about complicated and desperate women pushed to the very end of what they can handle and then pulled past the point of no return.
In If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Rose Byrne plays Linda, a therapist who has reached her breaking point. Her pre-teen daughter has an eating disorder and must be fed through a tube every night. Her husband travels for months at a time for work, her own therapist doesn’t seem to like her very much, and the ceiling in her apartment floods, leaving a giant black void that forces Linda to examine the gaping black maw of nothingness she finds at the center of her own life. Linda and her daughter move into a seedy motel while the ceiling is being fixed and end up trapped inside a spiraling dark night of the soul.
Make no mistake, Legs is a difficult watch, which takes the perpetual anxiety of Beau is Afraid, combines it with the relentless intensity of Uncut Gems, and peppers it with a generous smattering of Lynchian dream logic and nightmarish insanity. It’s not a “fun” movie to watch, but it is rewarding. First of all, if there’s a better performance this year than Rose Byrne, I will be in awe. This is prodigious work, made all the more astonishing by how unlikable Linda is as a human being, yet still harrowingly relatable and empathetic.
Director Mary Bronstein (whose husband and collaborator, Ronald, actually co-wrote Uncut Gems) hasn’t just crafted an impeccably well-written and acted film, but as a visual artist, she has immediately stepped into the rarified air of auteur. The tone, editing, cinematography, music, performances, and overall freaking vibe meld so flawlessly together as to make Legs one of those movies that immediately feels like it has always existed and we’re just now catching up to its singular wavelength.
Die My Love follows Jennifer Lawrence as Grace, a fiercely independent woman who moves out to the country with her boyfriend, Jackson, played by the increasingly impressive Robert Pattinson. Almost immediately, she becomes an unhappily bored and unsatisfied pregnant housewife. With the birth of their child, Grace begins to suffer from postpartum depression and a buried violence that progressively unlocks itself from her deepest corners.
People were pretty hard on Lawrence for a few years and I hope that’s over now because, to be honest, she’s been one of the finest actors of her generation since she exploded onto our screens with the masterpiece Winter’s Bone. Her work in Die My Love isn’t just her best since 2017’s Mother!, but quite possibly one of the most vulnerable and fearlessly naked performances that a movie star of her caliber has ever given. Her Grace switches from swooning and romantic one second to blisteringly feral the next, just with a shift in her eyes, and it’s truly mercurial work.
Scottish director Lynne Ramsey is probably on my Mount Rushmore of directors, as she directed not only one of my favorite films ever made with Morvern Callar, but also matches Lawrence in her fearlessness as an artist. Ramsay has only made five features across 26 years, and each one is more technically flawless, formally daring, and subversively experimental than the last. With Die My Love, she crafts a film of such achingly gorgeous frames and hauntingly lonely interior lives that it wounds the viewer with its sharp edges and jagged splinters.
Die My Love and If I Had Legs I Would Kick You aren’t just about motherhood, they’re about the price women pay to exist in the world every day — the judgements, the expectations, the perfection that society insists upon and then the cruelty it inflicts when they are just human. Both films are guttural screams of rage at a world that isn’t just unfair, but has been playing from a stacked deck all along.
While neither film would necessarily be described as a crowd pleaser, the rewards one gets afterward compensates for the discomfort of the viewing experience because both works put us directly, unflinchingly, behind the eyes of women going through crisis. This is cinema as empathy in ways we so rarely get from film. I hope all filmgoers who watch these two miraculous films discover more grace for their mothers, their wives, their partners, and their sisters. Or, at least, for themselves.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Grade: A
Die My Love
Grade: A-
This article appears in Dec. 10-23, 2025.