Madness of Maternal Life

Frann Michel

Die My Love (2025)
Directed by Lynne Ramsay
Written by Lynne Ramsay, Enda Walsh, and Alice Birch
Produced by Martin Scorsese, Jennifer Lawrence, Justine Ciarrocchi, Molly Smith, Thad Luckinbill, Trent Luckinbill, Andrea Calderwood
Distributed by Mubi

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025)
Directed & Written by Mary Bronstein
Produced by Sara Murphy, Ryan Zacarias, Ronald Bronstein, Josh Safdie, Eli Bush, Conor Hannon, Richie Doyle
Distributed by A24

MOTHERING UNDER CAPITALISM is a nightmare. And that’s even for those with the advantages of being married heterosexual cisgender white citizens who are not financially destitute. Such is the implication of two recent films written and directed by women.

Die My Love is about an aspiring writer and stay-at-home mother of an infant, living far from her original home, near the family of her often-absent husband; If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is about a professional-class woman caring for her sick child while her husband is away and their home becomes unlivable.

Both films feature uncertainty for the viewer about what is real within the world of the film and what is imagined, dreamed, hallucinated by their protagonists. These women seem to be losing touch with reality — maddened by the constraints and demands of their lives, failed by unsupportive partners, inadequate social networks, and psychotherapeutic banalities.

Neither film is an easy watch, but both offer impressive lead performances and cinematic panache. Both have been described as dark comedies and psychological dramas, though the humor is caustic in Die My Love and often cringe in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.

Both consider maternal anger, though only in Bronstein’s film is it directed at the child as well as the surrounding culture. Both position the viewer distinctively, with the camera often aesthetically detached in Ramsay’s film, and often uncomfortably close in Bronstein’s.

There are indeed a striking number of similarities, both substantive and trivial, between the films. Both were shot on 35 mm, both foreground constrained spaces and end in ambiguous scenes of the outdoors. Both lack an expected comma in the title. Both include the violent death of a family pet. Both include an African-American man as a possible escape or ally to the protagonist in an otherwise white main cast.

In both, the women return to their homes to find their male partners have in their absence effected repairs and new paint, implying the woman’s presence was itself an obstacle to improvements. Though neither film is a blockbuster, both have been well-received and popular, suggesting they have broader cultural resonance.

Neither protagonist suffers homelessness, food insecurity, or the pervasive threat or actuality of state violence. Neither faces custody battles or physically abusive partners. Neither film confronts the inaccessibility of reproductive health care or the crisis-level rates of maternal mortality (especially for African Americans) in the United States where both are set.

Yet together they suggest that the isolation and expectations at issue in many second-wave liberal-feminist critiques persist as live concerns, perhaps all the more relevant in light of the rightwing push to return to a fantasized notion of traditional gender.

“Find Everything?”

To be sure, Lynne Ramsay has insisted that the frequent description of Die My Love as about postpartum depression and psychois is “just bullshit:” “It’s not about that.”

The director, protagonist, and film resist prosaic diagnosis, but echoes of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) suggest the postpartum experience is part though not all of what’s in play in Ramsay’s fifth feature.

“Find everything you’re looking for?” asks a checkout cashier. “In life?” asks Grace (Jennifer Lawrence), who refuses to conform to the reduced expectations of a conventional life, or to paper over with polite lies the gap between the desires we are invited to satisfy through consumerism, and the larger wishes we may have for our lives.

The film never articulates those larger wishes. Instead, Grace throws herself — angry, lustful, caustic, feral, flailing — into the gap. Grace and her partner Jackson (Robert Pattison) have moved from New York to a house in Montana that he has inherited from an uncle whom we later learn has committed suicide there.

The opening scene gives us a static shot from the interior of the house, looking through a series of doorways, suggesting the constraints of enclosure. The impression of being boxed in is emphasized by the use of the nearly-square 1.33:1 academy ratio.

Ramsay softens the difficulties of mothering that are found in both Gilman’s story and in the short 2012 novel, by Argentine writer Ariana Harwicz, on which the screenplay is based. Gilman’s narrator simply “cannot” bear to be with her baby, and Harwicz’s also unnamed narrator reports her child “cries and cries and cries,” gets sick, and has to be accompanied everywhere by diapers and snacks and blankets.

But Grace hangs out with her placid, healthy-looking baby without visibly engaging in much of that constant domestic labor of infant care. In Die My Love, the problem is not the child but the context. Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) focuses on a mother coping with a violent child. But Grace says of her son, “He’s perfect; it’s everything else that’s fucked.”

Grace expresses her boredom and frustration at home by dancing around, making faces, licking a windowpane, crawling through the yard while carrying a large kitchen knife, eventually throwing herself through a glass door and later, like Gilman’s narrator, clawing paper down from the walls.

People around her try to be helpful. Another young mother tells her, “Babies are hard. I don’t think anybody talks about that enough.” Grace replies, “It’s all anyone talks about.”

Her mother-in-law Pam (Sissy Spacek) suggests that she start her day with hot water and lemon, or try taking an online yoga class. We understand the attempt to be helpful, but also the inadequacy of Pam’s suggestions to the angst and anger Grace acts out.

If I Had Legs

Where Die My Love downplays the tensions between mother and child, If I Had Legs repeatedly alludes to the potential violence of caregivers toward children.

The film references actual cases of a New York nanny stabbing her two charges, and of a Texas mother drowning her five children in a bathtub, as well as the 1980s films A Cry in the Dark (about the dingoes-ate-my-baby story) and Demons 2, a giallo featuring a possessed-cannibal-baby sequence.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You opens with an extreme closeup on the eyes of Linda (Rose Byrne) during a therapy session in which her unseen preadolescent daughter is heard explaining that Mommy is “stretchy” like “putty.”

Linda breaks in to insist that she’s not putty, she’s in control, but the very denial, along with the rest of the film, reveals her sense of being, if not manipulated, certainly overwhelmed.

The daughter, never named and seen mainly in fragments — dangling feet, a hand, a wisp of hair — doesn’t like eating food because it’s too “squishy;” her eating disorder is so severe that she has a tube in her stomach for nocturnal feeding, the machine for which creates an eerie red glow.

The head of the pediatric eating disorders clinic, Dr. Singer (Mary Bronstein), repeatedly reminds Linda that they need to schedule a meeting. When the child doesn’t meet her weight goal, Linda feels “I failed” because Dr. Singer “set us up to fail.”

The film’s title suggests both powerlessness and anger, evoking the “powerless responsibility” Adrienne Rich described 50 years ago as characterizing the position of women in the “institution” of motherhood: blamed for their children’s fates but unable to secure them.

Linda is herself a therapist, as well as in therapy. Her patient Caroline (Danielle Macdonald) is a new mother not bonding with her infant, fearful of leaving him with a sitter, fearful that she may harm him.

Linda tells her own therapist (Conan O’Brien) about a past abortion and wonders if she should have kept that child instead of the one she has. Caroline pursues Linda outside session, as Linda does her own therapist, each patient pleading for help the therapist does not, cannot, provide.

Five minutes into the film, a leaking ceiling in Linda’s apartment collapses, and Linda and her daughter relocate to a cheap motel until the repairs are complete. Linda spends much of the film on the phone arguing with the contractor doing repairs.

Indeed she spends much of the film arguing, usually by phone — with her therapist, her patients, Dr. Singer, and her husband (Christian Slater), away on an extended work trip and, like the daughter, presented only as an offscreen voice for most of the film.

Missing Connections

Both these films, then, seem to argue against the value of psychotherapy. Grace spends some time in an institution, later angrily thanking Jackson for having her committed. Any benefits seem transient; she’s soon again mad in both senses.

Ramsay’s film ends with Grace moving further away from conventions and into a wild landscape, figuratively if not literally freed. Bronstein’s ends with Linda thrown back from her attempted escape, apparently submitting to a greater conformity to her role. Her final promise to “be better” echoes an earlier promise/plea from her daughter, suggesting the mother’s infantilization.

We are a long way here from the independent films of the women’s liberation era, when Agnes Varda’s One Sings, The Other Doesn’t (1977) focused on female friendship and offered musical numbers about the pleasures of pregnancy and about the joys of having an abortion in a communal setting.

Previous films by Ramsay and Bronstein have included attention to women’s connections with each other, as in Bronstein’s first film Yeast (2008) and Ramsay’s second feature Morvern Callar (2002). But neither Grace nor Linda has a close female friend, much less a political movement to help make sense of her experience or provide a vision of a better world or a path to get there.

Without the presence of such a movement or community, even these narratives by skilled women directors offer no effective vision beyond the madness of the day, but they vividly dramatize some of the present pains of mothering for even the relatively privileged in America.

March-April 2026, ATC 241