A Therapist’s Therapist: Mary Bronstein Set to Direct “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”

More than a dozen years (plus some change) since she premiered her feature debut Yeast (a 2008 SXSW Film Festival selection), Mary Bronstein is set to direct her sophomore feature If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. A project that first hit our radar back in 2021 is slowly simmering and moving into a possible August production start date. Casting news should trickle in via the trades shortly. Naturally we have Elara Pictures Safdie Bros. producing alongside Sara Murphy and Ryan Zacarias‘ new shingle, Fat City. A24 will distribute.

We could probably insert Ronald Bronstein (who saw his only feature Frownland hit Criterion last year) in some capacity here and possibly see cinematographer Sean Price Williams re-team with Bronstein. Coincidentally the Le Cinema Club folks are streaming Yeast starting today. Here’s the synopsis for her new project:

With her life crashing down around her, Linda, a Long Island-based therapist and mother, navigates her way through an emotional minefield. She must navigate her child’s mysterious illness, an absent husband, a demolished home, a missing person, and an increasingly complicated relationship with her own therapist…all while treating her own crisis-laden patients.

Part of the mumblecore wave in the late naughts, Richard Brody was a fan of Bronstein’s debut stating “the movie crams incidents and emotion into its seventy-eight-minute span with a kaleidoscopic whirl of pugnacious energy. The women live on the edge of physical confrontation—tugging, kicking, pushing, throwing things at one another—and the movie’s mercurial shifts among extremes of expression reflect the shredded edges of twentysomething lives, whether it’s Gen’s button-pushing histrionic energy, Alice’s fortress-like quiet determination, or even Rachel’s increasingly weird drive toward an idea of normalcy.”