If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You — Why This Dark Film Feels True — But Isn’t

What happens when a dark film feels emotionally true—but quietly removes the possibility of hope?

In this episode of Salt & Light, we examine If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You and explore a deeper tension in modern storytelling: the difference between honest depictions of suffering and narratives that present a hopeless worldview as “realism.”

We break down how films shape belief—often more than we realize—and why some stories leave us unsettled in ways we can’t quite name. Is it because they’re telling the truth… or because they’re teaching us something false about what it means to be human?

For writers, filmmakers, and thoughtful viewers, this episode unpacks how worldview operates beneath narrative structure—and why it matters more than ever.

Because stories don’t just entertain us. They form us.

Watch this episode on YouTube

Free Resources for Writers:

Seven Deadly Plot Points FREE TRAINING VIDEO

Free Video Tutorial for Screenwriting

Sign up for The Storyteller's Digest, my exclusive bi-monthly newsletter for writers and storytellers. Each edition delivers an insightful article or practical writing tip straight from me, designed to help you master your craft and tell compelling stories.

The Storyteller's Mission Podcast is now on YouTube.  Subscribe to our channel and never miss a new episode or announcement.

📚 About The Storyteller’s Mission
The Storyteller’s Mission helps writers craft stories grounded in truth, meaning, and moral clarity — stories that shape culture rather than merely reflect it. We provide practical tools, writing tips, actionable lessons, and storytelling techniques to help you develop compelling stories, master story structure, build unforgettable characters, and polish your craft for personal and commercial success. Whether you’re writing novels, screenplays, or short stories, our bold, dynamic approach empowers you to execute your ideas with confidence and creativity—and maybe, just maybe, change the world.

  Support the Show!

Contact us for anything else!

Transcript

[00:00:00] Writers, storytellers, and thoughtful viewers. Let me ask you something. When you watch a film that's dark, how do you know whether it's telling the [00:00:10] truth about human suffering or quietly teaching you that life is meaningless? What's the difference between expressing the honest plight of the human condition [00:00:20] and portraying a moral universe where people are hopelessly trapped?

[00:00:25] Can you tell the difference? Hello and welcome to Salt and Light, where we examine [00:00:30] stories in pop culture, not just for artistry, but for worldview. And what we wanna know is we're asking what does this story want us to believe about [00:00:40] reality? I'm Zena Dell Lowe, and today we're discussing the Academy Award nominated film.

[00:00:45] If I had legs, I'd kick you. Yikes. [00:00:50] What a dark world this is. Now, the darkness in this world isn't just emotional. It's actually philosophical. This film doesn't just show bad things happening. It [00:01:00] assumes an emotional universe where people are trapped in their own pain. Connection fails more often than it succeeds.

[00:01:08] Vulnerability leads to [00:01:10] humiliation, not to healing or connection and humor sort of exists, but it's destructive rather than redemptive. And all of that is [00:01:20] adding together to say that hope is either naive or absent altogether. So the darkness in this film isn't just plot, it's philosophical. And I'll be honest, it was [00:01:30] painful to watch, not because I was emotionally erected for the characters, but because the world itself feels false.

[00:01:38] Maybe not factually, [00:01:40] but anthropologically, the title. Does a lot of work here. The title is the thesis of this film, and let's break that down because [00:01:50] if I had legs I'd kick you immediately communicate some things, frustration without agency anger, without any power to do anything [00:02:00] about it. A desire to act paired with complete incapacity.

[00:02:04] So it's existential. It's basically saying, I feel something deeply, but I [00:02:10] can't move and I can't change. I'm stuck. I can't intervene. And that is the movie. In a sentence, it's powerlessness and hopelessness. Now, critics love [00:02:20] this kind of storytelling because to them it feels truth. Because it refuses to pander to things like sentimentalism, or it [00:02:30] refuses to console people about the reality of human suffering.

[00:02:33] That's why these stories often win awards. They feel psychologically, raw and emotionally [00:02:40] relentless, which critics read as truthful, but they're truthful. Only inside a specific belief system. These stories resonate culturally because they [00:02:50] mirror a society that's losing a shared moral language. When you remove things like sin free will, the possibility of [00:03:00] redemption or forgiveness, what remains is pathology stories become case studies of dysfunction instead of [00:03:10] journeys toward restoration.

[00:03:11] So the real question is. What does this film believe about people? Because it seems to suggest, and in fact, [00:03:20] does that suffering doesn't lead to transformation. That self-awareness doesn't fix anything. Relationships don't redeem us. And meaning, [00:03:30] meaning might not be accessible at all. That is a profoundly modern post hope perspective, very in line with a lot of contemporary [00:03:40] storytelling these days.

[00:03:40] Now, if you haven't seen it, here's the basic plot. The story follows a mother who's also a therapist who's caring for a medically [00:03:50] fragile daughter while her husband is away working, and so she's alone with the emotional and physical demands of motherhood. Now, her daughter [00:04:00] refuses to eat and is relying on.

[00:04:02] Feeding tube. The mother tries everything and she has ideas of things to try, but the doctors dismiss her. Medical professionals don't [00:04:10] listen, and instead of helping her, all they do is seem to judge her. And this becomes the first signal that we are not in a morally balanced universe because [00:04:20] every single person that the protagonist encounters misunderstands her or judges her or abandons her, or is [00:04:30] actively harming her.

[00:04:32] There is no refuge. Now in real life, we run into some people like that. You know, some people fail us, but some people [00:04:40] help. Most people are a bit of a mix. They meet us halfway, but they fail to maybe help us all the way we go to the next person. But in this film, help is [00:04:50] completely absent. It never comes from any of the relationships that she meets.

[00:04:54] Compassion is absent. Competence is absent. [00:05:00] Even self-awareness produces nothing. So the message of this film isn't, people are broken, it's that people are irredeemably broken, and that is a very [00:05:10] different claim. This is why it feels like a lie to me. And it was painful to watch. It's not because I was hurting for the characters, it's because the characters in [00:05:20] this world are so horrible to the point of being dishonest, they don't represent reality.

[00:05:27] The universe we live in [00:05:30] includes moral agency. It includes the possibility of repentance. There is the existence of sacrificial love. We've seen it. We also know [00:05:40] that there's meaning and suffering. We've seen that. We also know that community belonging somewhere can be restorative. We've seen that. We've experienced that.

[00:05:49] [00:05:50] This film's framework rejects all of these premises entirely. And instead, it treats motherhood as entrapment. It treats marriage as [00:06:00] only adversarial. There's no relief. There's no companionship, there's no community there, there's no partnership. It treats therapy as [00:06:10] hollow ritual. There's nothing to gained there.

[00:06:12] It treats vulnerability as weakness that is exploited by others. So when I say it's dishonest, what I'm [00:06:20] really saying is that it denies some of the most basic realities about life that we ourselves know and have personally experienced. [00:06:30] At one point, there's even a biblical reference about how it's better to tie a millstone around your neck and throw yourself into this.

[00:06:37] See than it is to cause someone else to stumble. [00:06:40] But the problem is that the film assumes the impossibility of doing anything but that that is not refreshingly honest. It's [00:06:50] an existential lie. Now what's interesting is that the daughter is constantly present throughout the film, but we never actually see her face until [00:07:00] the very, very end.

[00:07:01] She simply exists as a voice, a need, a constant, relentless demand. What is the message? [00:07:10] Children are a burden. And in fact, every interaction that the mother has with the child is painful, but so is every other relational interaction. [00:07:20] Every man in this film fails to fulfill his masculine role as a protector.

[00:07:27] And husband and wives, again are at [00:07:30] war, therapists are worthless, all those things. Her own therapist is so completely uncaring and completely emotionally detached from her. It's as if he can't [00:07:40] even stand her. Meanwhile, she's working as a therapist herself and one of her own patients. Carolyn mirrors her own journey.

[00:07:48] With her struggles with [00:07:50] motherhood, but instead of her helping Carolyn, our protagonist fails Carolyn in the same way that she's being failed. So the cycle just repeats. [00:08:00] Nothing intervenes, nothing helps. There's no end. There's no help to be found. At one point, there's this terribly disturbing sequence of events where the daughter [00:08:10] has a pet Guinea pig, and it claw its way to freedom, and for a brief moment it escapes and it's running across the road, boom, only to become [00:08:20] roadkill moments later.

[00:08:21] So that's a very clear visual image of the message. There is no escape. There is no breaking [00:08:30] the cycle. All hope is lost. Then there's something else going on in the story, which is this metaphysical hole itself. A literal [00:08:40] hole itself that becomes both a metaphor and the driving plot behind the story. So the entire story centers around this hole that appears in her [00:08:50] ceiling out of nowhere, and for no particular reason, it's unexplained, it's destabilizing, it's ominous.

[00:08:57] Again, it becomes the central metaphor of the story. [00:09:00] It is not a trial to overcome. It is not a wound to heal. It's not even a mystery to understand. It's just [00:09:10] a void, and the symbolism isn't accidental. It also isn't subtle because the daughter becomes increasingly [00:09:20] associated with that void because the story frames maternal responsibility as suffocation.

[00:09:26] That is a very specific philosophical move. [00:09:30] It aligns with a worldview where obligation equals the loss of self and dependence equals oppression. Caregiving [00:09:40] becomes depletion without meaning. Again, this is not neutral storytelling. It's an anthropology. It's presenting an anthropological [00:09:50] view of human beings, the no moral structure universe.

[00:09:54] Okay? Here's what makes this story different from tragedy. It removes the [00:10:00] architecture of choice. In this world, suffering does not refine anyone. No one is transformed by love. A responsibility doesn't awaken anyone. No one [00:10:10] meaningfully repents or forgives or grows, but without the possibility for meaningful change.

[00:10:15] Through human agency, you don't get realism. You get [00:10:20] nihilism. Nihilism doesn't say life is painful. It says pain has no meaning and. People can't transcend it. [00:10:30] So there's a very big difference between dark storytelling and hopeless storytelling. Some of the greatest stories ever written are devastating, [00:10:40] but classical tragedy preserves one, essential element choice.

[00:10:44] Romeo and Juliet are tragic because their deaths weren't inevitable. [00:10:50] Tragedy dams, the characters in order to redeem the audience. This film removes that possibility altogether. The people here don't fail because of their [00:11:00] choices. They fail because the universe is structured to crush them. That's not tragedy.

[00:11:07] That's fatalism. Eventually this film [00:11:10] ends by closing the loop on its own philosophy. After her husband returns home and accuses her of neglecting her duties, which she is, she flees to the ocean, [00:11:20] intending to die because death is her only possible escape. She's succumbing to it as she is. She's starting to hear [00:11:30] voices, memories, echoes of conversations from the past.

[00:11:33] And those voices might offer her a glimpse of reality, a moment of [00:11:40] clarity or inspiration. But they do not. They don't guide her. They haunt her. They become accusatory, they shame her, and that's [00:11:50] when we hear her daughter's voice calling her back. So when the mother finally opens her eyes. That is the first time that we finally see the daughter's face.

[00:11:59] The [00:12:00] daughter pulls her back, not for the purpose of love or reconciliation, but because of obligation, the message is come back, you still have [00:12:10] responsibilities. And what does the mother do? She promises to be better, to try harder. But she won't because she can't, [00:12:20] and then the credits start to roll. This ending is especially telling because it's saying that there is no rescue, there is no intervention from outside the [00:12:30] self.

[00:12:30] There is no moral awakening. There's nothing strong enough to change this trajectory. It is inevitable. So the only [00:12:40] interruption to despair is obligation. That is how the film frames motherhood. And by withholding the child's face until the end, it keeps the daughter from being a [00:12:50] person. She's just an emotional demand of force.

[00:12:53] There's no delight in this relationship. There's only duty, and even the duty is empty. [00:13:00] And that's how the film presents despair as reality. So what is a human being? At its core, every story [00:13:10] answers this fundamental question. What does it mean to be human? This film's answer is that it means being reactive, wounded, [00:13:20] hopelessly trapped in patterns that they cannot escape my answer.

[00:13:25] The one that's consistent with the biblical moral worldview is that humans are [00:13:30] morally responsible creatures who are capable of repentance, and they are designed for relationship and they are able to grow toward love and [00:13:40] truth. These two anthropologies could not be more opposite and they cannot produce the same stories.

[00:13:46] One produces despair presented as reality. [00:13:50] The other produces. A possibility for redemption. Now, why does this matter and what do we do with a film like this? We analyze it first and foremost because [00:14:00] stories don't just entertain us. They shape what we believe about reality. There is a growing belief that humans are closed systems and that suffering is [00:14:10] final, and meaning is constructed or absent, that rescue isn't coming.

[00:14:14] But storytelling has always been at its most powerful when it insists otherwise. [00:14:20] So. May the stories you tell reflect the real truth about the world as it really is and about human beings as we really are in both our [00:14:30] dignity and our depravity. This is salt and light because stories shape culture.

[00:14:36] Culture shapes us. Thank [00:14:40] you for listening to the Storyteller's Mission with Zena Del Lo. May you go forth inspired to change the world for the better. Your [00:14:50] story.