Rose Byrne laughs when it is suggested that her new film If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is maybe even scarier than that horror, the-devil-is-in-the-child classic The Exorcist for its portrayal of a kid in a peril. In writer/director Mary Bronstein’s vision, written in reaction to a family crisis of her own, it is an overwhelmed mother double-teaming with an intractable medical condition that has placed a little girl in such dire straits.

“The screenplay was extraordinary,” Byrne says in conversation during a Bay Area visit to receive the Mill Valley Film Festival‘s Mind the Gap award, given to women in film. “It was visually descriptive, particularly with its more existential ideas, more Lynchian language.”

“It was so unpredictable a screenplay and also very funny,” she continues. “I couldn’

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