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When I was a child learning about the various wars and conflicts that have raged throughout history, I used to be secretly grateful that I was a girl. After all, history lessons and cosy period dramas alike would have us all believe that the men were tasked with bravely facing the brutality of battle, while women remained at home, safe, comfortable, and protected. But this is hardly an accurate portrayal, is it? For one thing, that gender binary is rather outdated. But there's also the fact that, for women, the home has never been without its own battles. Though it may have fewer bayonets, domestic life can be a bloody, brutal business. And few battles are harder than that of motherhood.
This year, filmmakers seem to be catching up and, finally, taking an interest. A new crop of female-led films are reframing the female domestic space, untangling it from its sanitised, comfy associations, and instead, presenting it as it truly is: a battleground of its own. Lynne Ramsey's new film Die, My Love sees Jennifer Lawrence taking on the role of a mother descending into a terrifying case of postpartum psychosis. In Chloé Zhao's Hamnet, Jessie Buckley gives a heart-wrenching performance as Agnes, William Shakespeare's wife, who undergoes the horrific trauma of losing a child. Finally, Mary Bronstein's If I Had Legs I'd Kick You stars Rose Byrne as a mother on the brink as she faces impossible pressure from every angle.
Ramsey's Die, My Love, which lands in cinemas this Friday, is a bold, brash, defiant film. Here, motherhood is not a quiet, cooing, coddled thing, but an unapologetic explosion of colour across the screen. And it can get ugly. Lawrence, in a raw, muscular performance, plays Grace, a writer and new mother, living with her husband Jackson (Robert Pattinson) in a rambling country home.
From her first moments on screen, Grace defies the socially acceptable image of what a mother should be. She's sexual, raw, a little wild. In one opening shot, we see her prowling through the tall grass outside their home, watching her baby and husband like a cat hunting its prey.
Their picturesque early parenthood soon descends into something akin to a horror film. Grace, often left alone with her child, begins to slip into postpartum psychosis. She imagines, hallucinates and unravels as her old self, and all sense of reality slips away. And we come along for the terrifying ride with her, unsure if anything we're seeing is real. In "Die, My Love," motherhood is not only lonely but also perilous.
Then there's Zhao's Hamnet, an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Maggie O'Farrell, which is a fictionalised retelling of the story of William Shakespeare's domestic life. The celebrated Elizabethan playwright was married to Anne (in the film, Agnes). The pair had three children: a daughter, Susannah, followed by twins Judith and Hamnet. In 1596, Hamnet died at the age of 11. His death is thought to have inspired Shakespeare's play Hamlet, written sometime between 1599 and 1601.
In Hamnet, Zhao refocuses the spotlight on Agnes (Jessie Buckley). She is, at the beginning of the story, a social outlier, more interested in collecting herbs, brewing medicinal remedies, and communing with her hawk in the woods than getting married and popping out a few kids as she is expected to do. After she and Will (Paul Mescal) fall in love, they welcome Susannah, and Agnes disappears into the woods to give birth. It's a brutal, primal scene in which Buckley pulses and squirms and screams like a wild animal. Her second pregnancy is even more horrific. This time, she gives birth inside – it's a bloody, visceral, aggressive sequence.
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Agnes is horrified to learn she is having twins – she was once told there would be only two children at her deathbed. Agnes becomes fixated on Judith, the weaker of the two twins, desperate to keep her safe. This unending maternal anxiety pulsates through the rest of the film – as mothers will often tell you, you are never not worried once you have a child. In an unimaginably cruel twist of fate, it is Hamnet, not Judith, who dies young. Agnes's wail of grief after her son's traumatic, painful death is earth-shattering. In Hamnet, motherhood is moments of joy, constant fear, followed by inconceivable, irreparable emotional pain.
And then there is If I Had Legs I'd Kick You. Less poetic and more savagely real, Bronstein's film is sad and uncomfortable. Linda (Rose Byrne) is a mother on the edge. While her home is being repaired, she checks into a motel. Her husband is away, while her daughter is suffering from an illness, leaving her hooked to a machine and refusing to eat, all while Linda tries to cling to her job as a therapist, bombarded with other people's problems.
Instead of framing her sick daughter as a sweet, tragic figure, she is almost impossible to feel for. She is an incessant voice on the phone, nagging, hounding, whining, and unhappy. It sends Linda to the edge of sanity, and, perhaps, beyond. The film tips into horror with touches of surrealism. The walls close in. The floors crumble. Life seems impossible to manage. Motherhood is a thankless, claustrophobic pressure cooker. This is far from the life Linda imagined – but, horrifyingly, here she is, stuck in it.
Each of these tales offers up its own refreshingly messy mother: an antidote to the overly sanitised, practically perfect, smiling mums we so often see plastered all over social media. And these mums are not merely messy. They are wild, joyful, rageful, loud, passionate, yearning. They are bursting at the seams. And perhaps most chilling of all, they are utterly alone in their battles. These three films take us inside the mother's experience in all of its complexity. Unflinchingly, they dare to show us the ugly, brutal reality of simply having and raising children.
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It's powerful to see film beginning to delve into the experience of motherhood, presenting it as it truly is. After all, the real experiences of motherhood are woefully under-researched and, as a result, often misunderstood. According to one study, nearly two-thirds (63%) think they are a “bad mother” some of the time, 39% sometimes think there is something wrong with them, 38% feel “trapped”, and 28% worry that things will never get better. Another UK survey found that almost half (47%) of new mums felt lonely on maternity leave, while 49% felt they had to express positive feelings about the time spent with their baby.
Portrayals of the uncomfortable aspects of motherhood are vital in reframing how we, as a society, view and treat mothers. Not only is being a mother one of the hardest things you can do, but no one else seems to get it. Mothers need support, both on a personal and professional level. And they need to know that they aren't alone in feeling stuck or lost or scared. Motherhood is its own kind of battle – and if filmmakers are finally beginning to paint it in full, messy colour, perhaps we can begin to see it that way, too.
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