Motherhood Is Filled With Agony. So Are the Best Films of the Year

This fall, cinemas around the country are echoing with a single, unmistakable sound: the primal scream of mothers pushed to a breaking point.

You can see it in the crevices of Rose Byrne's exhausted face in the October-release If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, where Byrne plays Linda—a therapist and mother worn down by caring for a school-aged child with a severe eating disorder. The roiling rage is there in Jennifer Lawrence's unraveling in November’s Die My Love, her desires turning her into an unpredictable beast, wielding a knife and crawling in the grass. It's even present in Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another, when the activist Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) chafes against the expectations placed on her once she gives birth.

The anguish is also historical, following us into costume dramas that typically deal with the trifles of men. Hamnet, based on Maggie O'Farrell's novel of the same name and currently playing, follows Agnes (Jessie Buckley), the wife of William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal), into paralyzing sorrow after the loss of one of her children. And over Christmas, you'll meet Ann Lee (Amanda Seyfried) in The Testament of Ann Lee, a musical retelling of the 18th-century spiritual leader who brought the Shaker religion to the United States. She was "Mother" to her followers, a moniker she took after the deaths of the four children she birthed.

Motherhood has certainly long been a theme in cinema, whether you're discussing Gena Rowlands's unraveling in 1974's A Woman Under the Influence or Faye Dunaway's over-the-top portrayal of Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest in 1981. More recently, films like 2018's Tully and 2024's Nightbitch have tackled the pressures put on upper-middle-class women who have children and are suddenly left behind by their peers and overburdened by their inattentive spouses. But this year in particular, there is an overwhelming sense on screen that the moms are not okay. Mary Bronstein, the director of If I Had Legs, thinks that the trend has to do with the anger a lot of women are feeling.

Women are "angry about a lot of things," she says. "Look, our rights are being taken away from us. We can't ignore that fact. Rights related to motherhood. We live in a country where the worst thing you can do is have an abortion, but once you have that baby, there's no support for you."

Film can answer that fury. "You want to see yourself reflected. That's what art is," she says. "You want to be able to look at it and find yourself in it somehow."

The contents of these films span generations and circumstances, tackling different ways of coping, but all recognize there is an eternal ache in the experience of child-rearing. Together, they feel like a bold statement on behalf of filmmakers—mostly female—that these wails should not go unnoticed. They force you to reckon with the pain of these women in unflinching, sometimes ugly, ways.

Bronstein, for one, knows If I Had Legs is radical. That's partially because of a device she employs to dig into the soul of Linda, who, in her desperation, behaves abominably over the course of the movie, drinking to excess and browsing the dark web for drugs. As unappealing as Linda's actions may be, for nearly the movie’s entire nearly-two-hour run time, we never see her daughter. Instead, the camera remains trained on Byrne's face.

"I'm putting an audience in a position where you cannot escape," Bronstein tells Marie Claire over Zoom. "There's nowhere else to go. You are going to watch this lady, and sometimes you are going to watch this lady cry, and it's going to be filling up the whole screen, and you can't turn away. You can't go anywhere. You're going to watch her pain."

Director Lynne Ramsay's lens also rarely turns away from Jennifer Lawrence's Grace in Die My Love, bearing witness as she literally claws at the walls of her home until her fingers bleed. Linda and Grace's children are in different phases of life. Linda has watched her reality crumble as her own life pursuits have taken a backseat to caring for her daughter's illness. Grace, meanwhile, has a newborn and is mired in a postpartum nightmare.

While Ramsay has said that the film isn't only about postpartum depression, it's clear that a change happened to Grace after the birth. Ramsay's hallucinogenic images imply that nothing feels real to this woman anymore, and as an audience, it's hard to tell what she is actually experiencing and what is a vision.

Both If I Have Legs and Die My Love are so close to their protagonists they can feel almost abrasive, but the ways in which they are off-putting is the point. Bronstein started writing If I Had Legs while going through a similar experience with her own child, who needed medical treatment. Linda became her emotional avatar, able to lose herself in a way Bronstein never could.

"You don't ever say, even in your most honest moments to your best friend, at least in my experience, 'You know what, I wish just for one day I wasn't a mom,'" Bronstein says. "It's a very dangerous thing that we do to mothers where you're not allowed to say these things."

That's the same reason why, in One Battle After Another, Perfidia's choice to abandon her baby is so shocking. Perfidia grows jealous of the way her partner (Leonardo DiCaprio) dotes on the infant and is frustrated that her revolutionary spirit must somehow be curtailed because she now has to fit into the role of mom. So she leaves. Women aren’t supposed to act this way in movies or in real life. They aren't supposed to complain or value themselves over their children.

In Hamnet, directed by Chloé Zhao, the suffering looks a little more traditional, but it feels epic.

"We're constantly in flux," Zhao tells Marie Claire. "We are constantly creating and destroying." Though Zhao has never given birth, she says that, from what she's learned, "every breath you are on the edge of life and death."

In Zhao’s film, Agnes (Jessie Buckley), is a deeply mystical person who has a vision of two children sitting at her deathbed when she herself passes. After she has twins during her second pregnancy, she dedicates her life to making sure her younger daughter, Judith (Olivia Lynes), is protected, thinking that child is marked for death. Instead, it's Judith's twin Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe), who dies of the plague.

In the tragedy of Hamnet's death, Agnes berates herself for her blindness and the fact that she was unable to foresee the tragedy. The loss is debilitating to her. For Zhao, it's an example of feminine chaos taking hold.

"When we say she's frozen, it's actually quite the opposite," Zhao says. "It looks frozen, but what it is is that her life force has gone into the chaos. There's no meaning and shape to hold her."

After suffering the deaths of all of her children in infancy, Ann Lee in The Testament of Ann Lee should be as paralyzed as Agnes. Director Mona Fastvold wanted to show in her film just how taxing Ann's births were to demonstrate how intense the subsequent loss of those children would be. The moments are depicted in visceral fashion, honing in on the image of a (prosthetic) vagina bleeding out and a nipple dripping milk.

"We really really wanted to portray [childbirth] in a truthful way," Fastvold tells Marie Claire. "It's really scary to do it at home, alone without the proper support, which was what it was like at the time."

That pain is for naught, and Ann's grief leads to a period of institutionalization. It should break her. Instead, she reaches for God.

"She took that immense loss and trauma and just transformed it into: I can't mother my children, so I'm going to mother the world," Fastvold says. "I'm going to be a leader as a mother."

Fastvold sees Ann's maternal instinct as her "superpower." But, at the same time, you can debate whether what Ann was actually experiencing was a true spiritual awakening or a form of postpartum psychosis—not unlike what Grace in Die My Love is going through.

Ann's methods draw suspicion from outsiders, often men of the Christian establishment. She preaches celibacy and worship that involves ecstatic dancing in which she and her followers pound their chests. There's a parallel between her ability to lose herself in this physical prayer and the ways in which Grace flails around to the Toni Basil song "Mickey" in Die My Love. Both are mothers trying to feel.

Watching them dance is liberating and a little terrifying, the same way you can't look away from Linda as she wanders the streets of Montauk in a daze or Agnes as she retreats in the wake of Hamnet's death. These films don't aim to empower with "you go, girl" mantras, but there's something powerful in their depiction of motherhood on the brink because they suck you into the madness. Society has looked away from these women for too long. Now you can't.