As soon as a demonic hamster meets its unglamorous ends in Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, you know shit’s about to hit the fan. The hamster was a pressure point — one of many — between mother Linda (Rose Byrne) and her sickly unnamed daughter (Delaney Quinn). Big “D” Daughter has been pitifully pleading for the pet for months, but Linda has remained firm in her conviction that the “rodent” would only add to their overflowing problems. In a moment of desperation — one of many — Linda offers up the purchase of the hamster to get Daughter to do something she does not want to do. The defeat is a brutal gut-punch, one which any parent intimately recognizes. The flare of shame, of giving in yet again, reflects onto Byrne’s face like a flash of lightning. How can her parental resolve be cut down so swiftly?
There has been a turn toward ‘mother horror’ in the zeitgeist of late, stories that embrace darker depictions of the motherhood transformation. These films do not balk in the face of the existential threat that motherhood presents to the women who bear it. They ask audiences to reinterpret mothering as a self-annihilating force. With Roe vs. Wade in the review mirror, the films convey the rageful impotence of a population separated from their bodily autonomy. Opportunities strangled, options diminished, 2026’s mothers are not afraid to talk about the consequences of their ‘taken-to-term’ actions. The films weaponize the cinematic medium to externalize this feminized dread with fear-inducing results.
In If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, those results are genuinely sickening. The film’s opening scene depicts Linda and her faceless daughter in a therapy session. “Mommy is stretchable,” Daughter tells the therapist, “especially when she’s sad.” Linda butts in quickly, claiming she is neither stretchy nor sad. But even in her desire to defend herself, the tears cling to her irises, ready to betray her at any moment. The truth sounds true, and denying it is a fool’s errand.
Linda’s life has reached an apex of parental destitution. Her daughter is in crisis, unable to eat food on her own, receiving nutrients through a stomach tube via incessantly pinging machinery. Linda’s apartment flooded after a massive hole ripped their ceiling asunder, gushing water like a badly tapped vein. Linda and Daughter are forced to live in a broke-down motel until the ceiling is fixed, with the landlord taking his sweet time on the repairs. Linda’s husband is AWOL traveling for work, present only through his condescending speaker phone voice. “I’m fine, everything’s fine,” is Linda’s automatic mantra in response to the chaos. But the truth is, it’d be enough to drive anyone crazy. And crazy is just where she is heading.
Linda’s starting to see things. Sometimes it’s a glowing, sentient light. Other times Linda perceives a celestial maw drawing her in through the ceiling hole, a gateway beckoning her in yet repelling her back. While Daughter’s face is consciously not shown, Byrne’s face takes center stage. As she’s getting stoned and drunk off motel wine, the camera hugs her tight, suffocating the cracks in her breaking façade. The feeding tube machine beeps, her husband calls, the landlord won’t answer, and Daughter’s incessant whining won’t stop. The film’s sound design is a creation of catastrophic claustrophobia, its ear-curdling mosaic turning the somatic experience into an adrenal laced panic attack.
In If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, the ultimate cruelty lies in its depiction of the child as a villain — a machine, a faceless deserter — leaving her mother adrift. Some of the darkest human questions are poked at and prodded — infanticide, suicide, child abandonment. In an early scene, desperate to get Daughter’s feeding tube removed, Linda begs a supervisor to book a removal surgery date. The woman replies that a surgery won’t be needed, that the tube is simply “pulled out” and the hole “wants to close” all on its own. In a nod to Chekov’s Gun, we know that Linda will, at some point, pull that tube out. And I promise you, it’s more disturbing than you can willfully imagine.
Where Linda’s mothering is portrayed through a viscous vascularity, Jennifer Lawrence is less embodied as a new mom in Lynne Ramsey’s Die My Love. Lawrence plays Grace, a former New Yorker who has recently moved to rural Montana with her oh so sweet and oh so simple boyfriend Jackson (Robert Pattinson). As Jackson is away (working in manual labor), Grace stays home with their six-month-old son. She spends her days prowling around on all fours, drinking beers while cooling her loins in the icebox, and masturbating. Her erratic behavior builds into a beguiling fizziness that simmers around her edges. She’s gorgeous and bawdy, a manic pixie dream girl ripe for the era of performative male softies. But it’s her snapping that punctuates the performance — whether it’s crashing unprovoked through a glass door or ricocheting her forehead off the bathroom mirror.
But what ails Grace? This is the central question of the film, and one that keeps ringing on and on after its end. The hypotheses abound; She’s frighteningly isolated and in a foreign environment. She has lost her sense of self in a postpartum haze, no longer attempting to write (she was, supposedly, a writer). Jackson’s rejection of her sexual advances has led her into a self-destructive spiral, desperately seeking validation elsewhere. She’s bored. She’s restless. She’s possessed. While the film gestures towards any and all of these fissures, none of them seem to fit the bill. I could not connect the woman who gracefully mothers her baby back to sleep in the middle of the night (never have I seen such an achingly accurate depiction of that specific ritual, with all its intimate sleepiness and tender swaying) with the woman who emphatically hurls herself through a plate of glass.
Do not get me wrong. The postpartum season of a woman’s life is deceptively dangerous. I mean that literally — danger exists, thrives, multiplies. I do not doubt that a mother could tend to her crying child in one moment and want to die in the next, but I did not believe Grace was that mother. My incredulity is most potently tied to the physicality of Lawrence’s performance. When she snaps she is white hot violence, but when she’s with her baby that violence evaporates. In both cases, her face takes on a mask of disassociation, somehow neither here (tending to her baby) nor there (slicing through grass with a cake knife).
In a scene where Grace ravenously claws at the oppressive wallpaper in her bathroom, I immediately thought of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story The Yellow Wallpaper. A cornerstone of feminist literary theory, the story is told from within the head of an unnamed woman who is slowly but surely losing her mind. Having had a nervous breakdown, she’s been told to “rest” herself back to sanity — no use for socializing, working (she is also a writer), or thinking. The endless idleness turns into an obsession with the wallpaper in her room, which takes on a menacing presence. Eventually, she too claws at the paper, her impotent rage transmuted into brutality. But whereas the woman in The Yellow Wallpaper is dying to get out, Grace seems to float above all her surroundings, untouched until it’s too late.
I found Die My Love’s most moving storyline in Jackson’s newly widowed mother Pam, the ever-excellent Sissy Spacek. Pam wants to embrace Grace, wants to help her navigate out of her misery. After returning home from a stint at a mental health facility, Jackson and Grace throw a party for her return. Grace has seemingly healed herself remarkably well, but guests keep commenting on how much “better she looks” — one of the cruelest phrases in the English language. Tasting the spiral, Grace calls for a toast. “May we all live long and die out.” The room goes quiet with pregnant uncertainty, as guests are unsure how to navigate the labyrinthine eggshells placed at their feet. But Pam rushes to stand, repeating Grace’s toast with gusto and a warm smile. Pam’s reflexive move to support Grace, her attempt to keep her grounded made my heart ache. Sadly, Grace cannot or will not receive this love, and her end called to mind another iconic image from feminist theory – ascension.
With unbridled vehemence, these films articulate an anger percolating within the psyche of American women. We are in an era where the federal government equates a woman’s worth with her ability to procreate. The president and his henchman are offering financial and legal incentives to women having more children, rolling back access to birth control across the country, and revoking abortion in many states. This federal fixation on the fertile and the sprouting of trends like Trad Wives and the MAHA movement has compelled artists to define their mothering in juxtaposition to those aims. Their mothers come with all the guilt, shame, and never-ending questions of worthiness and culpability that somehow do not show up in a Ballerina Farm post. Ramsey and Bronstein center the ultimate societal taboo — a woman who puts her needs above her child’s — asking audiences to contend with their own responses.
Are these women bad moms? Are they bad women? Should they be tarred and feathered, paraded through the public sphere, made to wear a scarlet letter? The filmmakers have created a hole, a gaping mother wound for us all to peer inside. Is it one that “wants to heal” itself? Only time will tell.