You’d be hard-pressed to find a topic more divisive than the state of modern motherhood. While recent books like Angela Garbes’s Like a Mother, Leslie Jamison’s Splinters, and Amanda Hess’s Second Life have added valuable perspectives—and important nuance—to the so-called “mommy wars,” there’s still no quicker route to madness than spending even five minutes on the r/Motherhood Reddit forums, or debating what it means to be a tradwife.
All the same, in the wake of the COVID crisis; amid a barrage of misinformation about pregnancy and autism; and as the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) is hamstrung by the government shutdown, the moms, broadly speaking, are not quite alright at the moment. Really, it’s no wonder that so many filmic depictions of motherhood recently have been so heavy on despair.
Once upon a time, maternal unhappiness seemed like the third rail of cultural discourse, something too dangerous to touch. But films like Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody’s Tully (2018), Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch (2025), and Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You all feature reasonably well-to-do, white mothers driven to the brink by their lack of practical or emotional support, using elements of the surreal to make their point. (Picture Charlize Theron’s Marlo hallucinating the household help she so desperately needs, or Amy Adams’s stressed-out stay-at-home artist-turned-Mother quite literally transmogrifying into a dog.) Lynne Ramsay’s upcoming Die, My Love, starring Jennifer Lawrence as a new mother gripped by a postpartum depression that devolves into psychosis, looks set to expand that canon.
Yet those are by no means the only stories being told about motherhood right now. It’s difficult to think of a more affecting example than Alice Diop’s Saint Omer (2022), revolving around a pregnant novelist who attends the trial of a Senegalese woman accused of murdering her baby. There are no easy solutions in Saint Omer, no prepackaged theses or tidy narratives about how having kids will make you crazy; it’s just one woman, on the uncertain brink of motherhood, recognizing glimpses of herself in the tragic story of another. “In Saint Omer, silence is key," Jennifer Padjemi wrote of the film in a 2024 Criterion Collection essay. “It communicates fear, anger, empathy, loneliness, and sadness, but also the intergenerational trauma of women who have never been allowed to express their feelings.”
Also unlike Tully’s Marlo or Nightbitch’s Mother, in A.V. Rockwell’s feature directorial debut A Thousand and One, the threat that Teyana Taylor’s single-mom protagonist Inez faces to her motherhood (and, consequently, her sanity) comes from without, not within. At the film’s outset, Inez kidnaps her young son Terry from foster care shortly after her release from prison, and A Thousand and One chronicles her attempt to parent despite the scourges of abuse, police brutality and systemic racism. With no safety net to speak of, hallucinating nannies or running the streets in “dog mode,” aren’t even a consideration.
Elsewhere, Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers (2021) gives the discontents of modern mothers rich historical context. While the film focuses primarily on photographer Janis (Penélope Cruz) and teen single mother Ana (Milena Smit), whose lives become inextricably linked after they give birth on the same day, Almodóvar also examines the long shadow of the Spanish Civil War, situating the pain and isolation of new motherhood within a long legacy of it.
Even Pixar films haven’t shied away from deepening their portraits of mothers. Domee Shi’s Oscar-winning 2018 animated short Bao revolves around an aging Chinese Canadian mother who adopts a sentient baozi as her substitute child after her real son grows up and moves out. Shi’s mother-protagonist tearfully devouring her baozi boy to keep him from leaving, in the film’s climax, captures something potent about how we, as a society, are starting to see motherhood, even in cartoons. No longer does honoring the profundity and beauty of raising a child mean ignoring the things that make it painfully hard. In film, as in life, both things exist side by side.
