Monthly Archives: February 2026

  • If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mary Bronstein (2025)

    Since early last year, when Mary Bronstein’s second feature had its world and European premieres at Sundance and Berlin respectively, Rose Byrne’s performance in the film has been attracting attention and admiration.  Hardly surprising because If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is virtually a one-woman show – never more conspicuously than in the early scenes, where Byrne’s character, Linda, is conversing with other characters but Linda’s face is the only one on the screen.  In the opening sequence, she and her young daughter, who has a serious eating disorder, talk with a doctor; next, Linda and the child are in the street together; then back in their apartment in Montauk, Long Island.  The child (Delaney Quinn) calls out from the bathroom, which is flooding; as Linda investigates the cause, the ceiling collapses.  Mother and daughter must move out temporarily, to an unlovely nearby motel.  It’s not until Linda is in the motel store late one night that other people come into view – the amiable motel superintendent James (ASAP Rocky), a store clerk (Ivy Wolk) who’s a little Hitler in punk disguise.  Soon after this, Linda has the first of her several interactions with a visible psychotherapist (Conan O’Brien).

    She badly needs his services.  Her child’s condition requires a gastric tube and round-the-clock supervision, and Linda is clearly stressed even before the ceiling comes down.  She’s also, in effect, a single parent.  Her husband Charles, who captains a ship, is no more than a voice on the other end of a phone line, usually telling his wife what she’s doing wrong.  The unsmiling therapist (who’s also unnamed so I’ll call him Conan) exasperates her, too.  Writer-director Bronstein soon ensures that Linda’s it-makes-you-want-to-scream situation is infectious – it was for this viewer anyway.  I gather the story derives from the film-maker’s personal experience of caring for a chronically sick child.  I’m sorry about that but Linda, despite her problems, is far from underprivileged and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, for all Rose Byrne’s formidable commitment and tireless emoting, comes over as a relentless middle-class moan.

    As a result, the film, which runs a few minutes short of two hours, gets boring.  Mary Bronstein’s husband, Ronald, co-wrote Marty Supreme, and Rose Byrne looks to be Jessie Buckley’s main rival for the upcoming Best Actress Oscar:  into the second half of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, I was reduced to keeping myself awake by thinking of other, random connections with Marty Supreme and Hamnet.  In Marty, a bathroom floor collapses; in Legs, an inundated bathroom heralds the ceiling collapse.  Linda, like Agnes in Hamnet, has a husband whose work takes him far from home, leaving her to cope alone with domestic crisis.  This year’s Golden Globes for Best Actor/Actress in a Comedy or Musical went to Timothée Chalamet for Marty and Rose Byrne for Legs.  If you’re interested in film awards (for many, a big if, I know), that last point is worth dwelling on:  how come these movies are categorised as comedy?   It can’t be enough that Marty and Legs include a few jokes and potentially amusing incidents.  Plenty of reviews of Legs describe it as a black comedy but it isn’t:  Linda’s predicament is almost never treated as a laughing matter.  The reasoning seems to be, rather, that Bronstein’s film, like Marty Supreme, piles up unfortunate events – misfortunes major and minor – to such an eventually improbable degree that you can’t take it seriously.

    It turns out that Linda herself is a psychotherapist, and Conan a colleague whose office is up the corridor from her own.  When Linda’s at work, her daughter attends a day treatment programme run by earnest Dr Spring (played by Mary Bronstein), who supervises the children’s care and supplies their mothers with counselling-cum-pep-talks.  Linda’s attendance at one of these sessions doesn’t go well.  Infuriated by Dr Spring’s ‘It isn’t your fault’ mantra, Linda, as other mothers sit gently snivelling, storms out, insisting that ‘it is your fault’ – in other words, that feeling guilty is tantamount to being guilty.  We learn that she was pregnant once before, when she and Charles were first together, but had an abortion:  at one point, Linda confesses to Conan her irrational conviction that she ‘got rid of the wrong baby’.  Although a couple of her other patients briefly feature, the main one is Caroline (Danielle Macdonald), a new mother whose acute post-partum anxiety is hardly conducive to taking Linda’s mind off her own problems.

    Linda’s being a therapist makes for a decent reveal, but the subplot involving Caroline is punitively melodramatic.  She leaves her baby in Linda’s office and disappears.  Conan the emotional barbarian and Caroline’s husband – whose priority is, like Charles’, his work – compete in being unhelpful, so Linda calls the police, who perfunctorily predict that Caroline will turn up.  She does, at the motel one night, demanding to see Linda.  That doesn’t go well either:  when they argue, Caroline slaps Linda’s face then disappears on a dark beach, apparently heading for the sea.  The writing was on the wall when she emailed to Linda a video of Andrea Yates, the real Texas mother who, in 2001, drowned her five children after developing post-partum psychosis.  The video shows a prison interview in which Yates quoted scripture – ‘Better to tie a millstone around your neck and throw yourself into the sea’, etc.

    In the film’s closing stages, Mary Bronstein confirms the link you suspected between the hole in Linda’s ceiling and the one in her daughter’s stomach, where the gastric tube goes.  Linda decides to remove the tube and hallucinates the surgical hole closing, possibly thanks to drugs that James has been helping her buy on the dark web.  Her husband returns (in the person of Christian Slater) and mansplains that the ceiling has been fixed:  captain Charles simply had a word with the repairmen who’ve been frustrating his wife, and hey presto.  They head back to the motel to pick up their daughter; Linda tries and fails to keep Charles out of the room, where she left the child unsupervised.  They find James inside and Charles assumes he’s a babysitter.  James broke his leg on a recent visit with Linda to the apartment, where he managed to fall through the hole in the ceiling.  Reasonably fed up with her, he angrily informs Charles that he’s not the babysitter but the motel superintendent:  he heard the girl’s panicked screams at finding herself alone and entered the room to calm her down.  As soon as Charles sees that Linda has removed the feeding tube, she runs off to the same beach where Caroline was last seen, and tries to drown herself, without success.  She wakes up on the beach, with her daughter beside her.  Linda promises the girl she’ll ‘do better’ in future.

    It will be obvious from all the above that Linda’s daughter is nameless.  According to Google AI, this ‘is an artistic choice to represent how Linda views her child as a burden or illness’.  But how does that work for the likes of Charles and Dr Spring, who don’t name the child either?  By telling the story of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You entirely from the protagonist’s point of view, Bronstein can blur the dividing line between what’s really happening in the outside world and what’s a reflection of Linda’s inner turmoil verging on breakdown.  The catchy, clever title is apparently meaningless, yet it captures Linda’s angry feelings of helplessness.  The film isn’t illuminating, though, because it’s purely behavioural:  we see what Linda does without learning much about her personality.  Rose Byrne’s powerful naturalistic acting masks the fact that she’s playing a representative figure.

    And the director’s insistent artfulness keeps getting in the way.  That opening trick of keeping the camera away from any face except Linda’s quickly announces itself as a device, but that’s nothing compared with Bronstein’s concealment of the daughter’s face throughout the story.  We see her legs as she sits in the flooded bathroom, the side of her head as she sleeps beside her insomniac mother and, in the latter stages, more than enough shots of her navel.  You guess from a long way out what the film’s closing image will be.  As Linda regains consciousness on the beach and her daughter murmurs reassuring words, Mary Bronstein delivers a close-up of the child’s beatific smiling face.

    20 February 2026

     

  • My Father’s Shadow

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Akinola Davies Jr (2025)

    Akinola Davies Jr was born to Nigerian parents in London, in 1985, and raised in Lagos.  He studied at the New York Film Academy before making music videos and commercials for high-end brands (Gucci, Louis Vuitton), then Lizard (2020), an eighteen-minute dramatic piece inspired by an incident from his own childhood in Nigeria, which won plaudits and prizes.  As well as directing My Father’s Shadow, his first feature, he shares the screenplay credit with Wale, his elder brother by a couple of years.  (The dialogue is in English, Pidgin English and Yoruba.)  The brothers’ father died when both were infants, Akinola not yet two.  He has said that their mother, who brought her sons back to England as young teenagers, did an ‘incredible job of encasing [their father’s] memory in something that’s positive’.  The influence of all these factors is evident in My Father’s Shadow.  It’s tantalising and occasionally clumsy, but the story and its main character – the father of two young sons – are always fascinating.

    The film is set in Nigeria in June 1993, when presidential elections were held for the first time since the coup of ten years earlier that resulted in military government.  My Father’s Shadow opens with a medley of images.  News film of Nigeria’s soldiers in government and on the streets, and of M K O Abiola, the Social Democrat candidate in the election run-off.  Animal and insect life, rotting fruit on the ground.  The action that follows takes place mainly in Lagos but begins and ends in rural Nigeria, where eleven-year-old Remi (Chibuike Marvellous Egbo) and eight-year-old Aki (Godwin Chiemerie Egbo) live with their mother.  Their father, a factory worker in Lagos, is rarely at home.  The boys are outside, eating cereal, talking and bickering, when they hear sounds from inside the house.  It can’t be their mother, who they know has gone to a nearby village to do the family shopping.  Remi and Aki go inside to find their father, Folarin (Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù), in a bedroom.  When he tells them he needs to get back to Lagos urgently to pick up his wages, Aki protests that he’s hardly ever home.  Folarin makes the apparently impulsive decision to take his sons with him to Lagos, leaving a note for their mother.  The bus they catch runs out of fuel, and the threesome hitchhike the rest of the way.  Over the course of the next twenty-four hours, Folarin takes his sons round Lagos to see places and people significant in his personal history.  At the same time, he and other ‘MKO’ supporters impatiently await the election result.

    At one point in Lagos, the boys and their father bump into an apocalyptic preacher, quoting again and again, ‘Your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams’ (Acts 2:17).  The preacher’s words chime with a child’s voiceover heard at the start of the film, telling his father, ‘I will see you in my dreams’, and that phrase, repeated in voiceover several times, will become a virtual refrain.  It’s crucial to the whole conception of My Father’s Shadow.  Akinola and Wale Davies in effect are imagining a father about whom they remember very little or, in Akinola’s case, nothing at all.  What they put on the screen no doubt makes complete emotional sense to the Davies brothers.  For their audience, the narrative they’ve concocted is more puzzling in its intersection of Folarin’s working life, political engagement and trip down memory lane for his sons’ benefit.

    The short-term outcome of Nigeria’s 1993 presidential elections was to replace one military government with another.  The country’s leader, Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, despite unofficial results that indicated a clear win for M K O Abiola, annulled the election, claiming widespread election irregularities.  The annulment immediately triggered large-scale street protests.  In the wake of continuing unrest, Babangida resigned.  A weak interim civilian government was replaced before the end of the year by a military regime headed by Sani Abacha.  Civilian democracy was eventually restored in Nigeria in 1999.  It’s understandable that My Father’s Shadow makes use of the dramatic outcome and aftermath of the 1993 elections even though the Davies brothers’ own father was no longer alive then (he must have died around 1987 if Akinola was under two years old.)  There’s a disjuncture, though, between the fluent, expressive scenes that focus on Folarin’s personal reminiscences and relationships with Remi and Aki, and the film’s dramatisation of the political situation.

    The worm-eaten fruit at the start, juxtaposed with shots of uniformed officials, instantly hints at something-rotten-in-the-state-of Nigeria.  There’s an early reference to soldiers shooting dead protesters at Bonny Camp, a Lagos military base.  On the bus journey, passengers speak up for and against the government.  Some insist that authoritarian military rule is the only solution to lack of discipline in the country; others deplore the increasing social and economic instability of life under the junta.  The regime’s opponents have more to say when Folarin meets up in Lagos with work colleagues and others:  we also learn that he’s especially anxious to get his wages because the factory staff haven’t been paid for months.  These various elements supply helpful context – but how exactly is Folarin involved in political activity?

    Friends in Lagos often address Folarin as ‘boss’ (‘kapo’) – a term of friendly respect that seems to refer to his political standing rather than his status in the factory, where Folarin’s just another unpaid worker.  Several people, both in the Lagos café where the MKO supporters gather and elsewhere, mention, on greeting Folarin, that they haven’t seen him for a while, an absence that isn’t explained.  Akinola Davies occasionally inserts flashes of violence that are almost subliminal.  Although these may be no more than suggestive expressions of junta practice, Folarin’s repeated nosebleeds during the time he spends with his sons seem to imply he’s been on the receiving end of violence and is suffering its after-effects.  Street protests at the annulment of the election start up as soon as Babangida has made the announcement on television.  Folarin and his scared children are passengers in a car en route out of Lagos when they’re detained at a checkpoint.  After Folarin has been hauled out of the car, one of the soldiers angrily claims to recognise him from the recent Bonny Camp unrest.  Another soldier’s intervention allows Folarin to get back in the car, which continues its journey, but this is the last time Folarin is seen alive.  Davies cuts to Remi and Aki back home, getting washed and putting on formal clothes, to accompany their mother (Efòn Wini) and other mourners on their father’s funeral procession.

    This concluding jump forward in time has great impact, for two reasons.  Despite those nosebleeds, Folarin’s death hasn’t been prepared for.  Then there’s Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù, the dominant focus of the camera’s attention through most of My Father’s Shadow.  As a result, and thanks to Dìrísù’s intense yet subtle charisma, Folarin’s abrupt removal from the story as a living being – he’s now a photograph beside his coffin – is a real shock.  Davies and his cinematographer, Jermaine Canute Bradley Edwards, often shoot the lead actor in tight close-up, to great effect.  The camera never catches Dìrísù doing anything phony or obvious to present Folarin’s feelings; but even though we can read those emotions, Dìrísù’s handsome face also has a persisting mystique.  It tells us we can only know so much about who this man is.  That surely is what Akinola Davies and his brother – who, since they never knew their father, are in the same boat as the viewer – want to convey in their film’s father figure.

    Folarin points out a Lagos theatre where the boys’ mother spent all her money watching plays when she was a student in the city.  He and his sons eat street food and visit an amusement park.  In an episode at the heart of the film, they swim in the sea, after which Remi and his father talk on the beach.  (The lyrical sequence in the sea naturally calls to mind Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight (2016).)  The two boys, played by actual brothers, are wonderfully contrasted.  Aki’s high-pitched, unusual voice is part of what makes him a bit of a diva – moody, liable to dispute with his father as well as his elder brother.  Remi is graver, more thoughtful and somewhat awed by Folarin, who repeatedly asserts the importance of brotherly love to both boys.  In the beach conversation, Folarin tells Remi (Aki is sitting a little apart, sulking) how his brother, also named Remi, drowned when they were kids.  Folarin continued to see visions of the brother’s unquiet ghost until he named his own first son in memory of his brother, after which the visions stopped.

    The quiet, reflective talk on the beach is cut short by the noisy arrival of a gang of youths, who head for a beached whale and start hacking pieces out of it.  This incident may be Davies’ most imaginative suggestion of endemic and unpredictable violence in the society he’s describing.  The outraged reactions to Babangida’s election announcement aren’t nearly as powerful and there’s another awkward bit in the café when Folarin orders soft drinks for the boys and palm wine for himself and his friends, the order taken by a waitress called Abike (Uzoamaka Power).  Davies holds the camera so long on her face that it’s made obvious that Abike and Folarin are, or have been, lovers; this is then confirmed in a supposedly private conversation between them which Remi overhears.  Akinola Davies intends the film to be oblique but his handling of a moment like this, and of the story’s political dimension more generally, tends to undermine that intention.  Still, the word ‘Demo-crazy’, shouted around the café, is an ingenious touch – reflecting both the drinkers’ overexcited hopes for a transition to civilian democracy and the protests that result from those hopes being dashed.  And My Father’s Shadow achieves something truly remarkable in the person and presence created by Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù.

    19 February 2026

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