Think back to the worst day of your life, a time when everyone and everything seemed hellbent on punching you down to the bottom. There might have been signs that this was coming, spread out over weeks, months, maybe even years. But you didn't think it would all explode at once, with the only response being deafening silence. The weight of it all made you numb, an almost fight-or-flight response bringing you to a primordial state.

For Linda (Rose Byrne), that kind of day seems to happen every day. Her husband (Christian Slater, doing some of the best phone acting of the year) is away on business for weeks, leaving her to be the sole caretaker of their daughter, who has an unlabeled illness that keeps her from eating solid food and must be fed through a tube while she sleeps. Her career isn't much better, with her job as a therapist forcing her to listen to other people's struggles all day long in a dingy office. Even a therapist needs a therapist, but the colleague who's filling that role (Conan O'Brien) doesn't seem to like her and never offers any helpful answers. Every question she has is thrown back with a demeaning tone, as if it's insulting for an adult to have these kinds of problems. Oh, and there's a giant, gaping hole that flooded her apartment, forcing her and her daughter to take an extended stay at a crappy motel.

However bad things get for Linda, there's always worse for us as we have to witness them through writer/director Mary Bronstein's lens. Annoying little clicks and clacks are pumped in during the opening studio logos, with the opening shot being an unbroken extreme close-up of Byrne's as she's passively aggressively being told by her daughter's doctor that she isn't doing enough. The child is never seen, but her constant complaining and questioning lead us to imagine some sort of bratty little demon. A pizza box falls on the ground, ripping off all the cheese. And then a hamster is run over by a car. At that point, the only choice we have left is to laugh at the pain.

All of this makes If I Had Legs I'd Kick You a challenging movie to deal with. Was I annoyed because of the fact that the movie makes its point within the first hour, and then spends the next hour reheating it? Or was I annoyed because that's what Bronstein wanted me to feel, constantly irritated to the point of rethinking my life choices? I'd imagine it was a little from both columns, although the former seems to be the more dominant of the two. I was reminded a bit of Nightbitch from last year, another movie about motherhood with a strong premise and committed lead performance that is ultimately let down by an unwillingness to go beyond the surface.

Byrne is a standout in the lead role, acting as the sole reason to keep rooting for her character to finally make the right decision. She both is and isn't trying to be better, caught in a limbo of nothingness that we often find too comfortable. Bronstein is married to Ronald Bronstein, a frequent co-writer and co-editor with the Safdie brothers. The eldest, Josh, is a producer on this film, giving credence to the comparisons to Adam Sandler's anxious downward spiral as Howard Ratner in Uncut Gems.

To state that I never want to watch this film again isn't much of an overreaction. Honestly, anyone who willingly puts themselves through this on more than one occasion needs to be medically assessed. Effectively weaponizing this much chaos is an achievement on Bronstein's part, and Byrne's determination is admirable. It's a lot of sound and fury, signifying something, I guess.