Motherhood has always been part of storytelling in films but in 2025 it felt like a new wave of (most female) filmmakers challenging the conversation of what motherhood feels like and does to a woman’s mind, soul, and body. An important distinction here is that the films that felt most effective at this were those written and directed by mothers themselves. While it’s easy for anyone to tell a film about motherhood and a father or aunt can also tell these stories, the most immersive story comes from a mother herself. What was fascinating about 2025 films in particular is that the films top of mind focusing on motherhood all tackled various stages of being a mother. Ranging from pregnancy loss to stillbirth to immediate postpartum experiences to parenting toddlers to grieving a child, so many viewpoints were highlighted and in such a way that each one felt like living in the experience. These films can connect for all who have felt the same emotions ranging from anxiety to depression to grief, but the way a mother lives through these emotions is something entirely different. Motherhood for me has always felt difficult to verbalize or explain in a way that appropriately expresses the highest of highs and lowest of lows. The highs knockout the lows but at what cost? In The Testament of Ann Lee, it felt like the trauma and heartbreak shaped Ann’s existence. While in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, it felt the film encapsulated every frustrating though I’d ever had but also the tenderness of how much a snuggle with my daughter means. In Die My Love, I felt transported back in time to the haze of my first six months after having my baby, the way nothing made sense, and I felt so out of body and lonely. These are all entirely different stories, feelings and shapes of motherhood that only a mother can understand. Watching these films back-to-back would not be recommended to anyone but what an emotional, mental warfare for mothers. I truly sat too stunned to speak after most of these.

In both The Testament of Ann Lee and Hamnet, the mothers at the center of each story live through a trauma of child loss that I cannot relate to on any level. While Hamnet as a film didn’t work for me overall, the scene that has stayed with me is when Agnes (Academy Award Nominee Jessie Buckley) gives birth and there’s a moment everyone in the room thinks the child won’t make it. Agnes has been plagued with dark premonitions of loss; she swears it’s coming for her daughter. The birth scene with her twins, Hamnet and Judith, itself is so unbelievably well done with the risk and agonizing pain women of this era went through giving birth but also how they truly had no idea what was going on or at risk in the moment. When we give birth now, even if not in a hospital, we know the risks, we know most of what is going on in the womb. Watching Hamnet was one of the first time in recent films I felt the weight of the unknown on everyone in the room. Where Hamnet loses me personally is the lack of focus on maternal grief and the switch to Paul Mescal’s Shakespeare writing and then debuting his play, Hamlet. While it would feature interestingly with a few other films this year with a focus on how fathers slip into the responsibility of fatherhood, I found Hamnet most arresting and emotionally moving when focused on Agnes and her journey. I know the story ends with her acceptance when watching the play, it just felt the rich text of Maggie O’Farrell’s book was lost within the structure of the film for me. Maternal loss is such a dark subject but as we’ll dive into how pregnancy and motherhood upend your entire existence, it’s such a worthy theme to have more films exploring. 

With The Testament of Ann Lee, while many will subject her as ‘mother’ strictly because of her assumed title ‘Mother Ann,’ the loss of her four children, beautiful treasures, challenges this notion. I’ve become friend who is too woke feeling a bit agitated with labeling any fierce woman ‘mother,’ and the response to the woman that Ann Lee is feels directly derived from her body itching for her to fulfill the journey of motherhood. Her body not only went through pregnancy and labor multiple times, but she loved her children, she held her children. Where does that grief go? Where does that unfulfilled love channel into? Mona Fastvold, director and co-writer, and Amanda Seyfried believe Ann harnessed these feelings into dance, song and worship. The scenes of labor and loss feel imperative to be in the film and not torture porn adjacent at all, for me, because they showhow Ann got to the place she needed to become Mother Ann. The visceral, uncomfortableness of pregnancy and childbirth is considered a taboo topic despite how many people each year give birth and experience both physical and mental trauma from it. To understand what it does to your mind and body, sometimes seeing is believing and the manner in which its ‘trauma porn’ versus artistic exploration of real trauma is all about the tender hand of the filmmaker. Fastvold and Seyfried, both mothers, know and understand this balance; they know the vulnerable pain and discomfort. The way for months after giving birth I felt uneasy watching anything with birth or pregnancy (me, a horror fanatic) yet I slowly realized it all stemmed from the respect of the storyteller actually. The care, admiration and respect Fastvold and Seyfried both have for Ann as a mother is what makes this film so incredibly moving. 

Another fear I had following my own personal experience with pregnancy, birth and postpartum was reliving my postpartum disorders. Both postpartum depression and anxiety feel like a blur I remember the weight of both but not the experience of each disorder. I remember vividly how heavy the distance I felt in the moment so many had spent many months telling me would be the best experience of my life, what a joyous moment. While I’ve always dealt with depression, I wasn’t prepared for it to be heightened during my pregnancy. I had a rather difficult pregnancy, right after the pandemic and in the rollout of the vaccine, I was sick the entire time and lost weight all throughout leaving me in and out of the hospital getting fluids. And to wrap all that up, I gave birth well over a month early with a traumatizing delivery that left us both in the hospital for over a week. Once we were finally both healthy at home, I was alone with my beautiful daughter and my thoughts. It’s interesting to not remember when or how I realized I was dealing with postpartum disorders, but my doctor has been so instructive on the language of how to communicate it with him, I was able to take care of myself. Watching Die My Love was the first time I could remember exactly how it felt. This allusiveness that many feel with depression but with postpartum depression you’re balancing not only the responsibility of being a new parent but also the emotions that come with it. So often parents tell you ‘you’ll never know how much you can love someone until you have a kid’ and fuck if that’s not true. The weight of how much you love your kid feels suffocating (in the best way) and when you’re with your child for the first time it’s an indescribable feeling, it’s impossible to explain but it’s also impossible to process. The mindset to understand this new feeling is so incredibly hard and draining, despite being so wonderful. What I love most about Die My Love is the way the film communicates both in words and through Grace’s (Jennifer Lawrence) actions; you never question how much she loves her child. It’s not her, it’s the postpartum disorder consuming her. Everything I dealt with postpartum felt like a cloud over my brain, I couldn’t remember how consuming and dark the emotions felt until I was watching this film. I know I went through it, but I don’t remember what it was. When Grace says to her husband “I’m right here, you just can’t see me” after an outing where other mothers tried to relate but Grace just couldn’t connect. It summed up the entire experience for me, the people I wanted to see me didn’t and those who probably understood felt millions of miles away. The person I wanted most to see me, understand me and help me just simply couldn’t. 

In No Other Choice, the film is not focused on motherhood but the way the story was reframed to give the wife, Lee Miri (Son Ye-jin), more of a role, her duties as a mother feel impossible to not connect with. The brilliant screenplay allows for such depth, even without a dominating amount of screen time, to unfold in the background of what the film is centered on. Yoo Man-su (Lee Byung Hun) refuses to put in the actual effort on something logical to find a new job, his motivations are focused on tasks to stroke his ego and make a job come to him rather than just simply putting in the work to become the best suited candidate. While Miri chooses to navigate in a way that is best for her family. The way a woman, a wife, a mother looks at the situation is entirely different, as this is the way traditional marriages have operated. The wife/mother figure carries the burden of being the responsible one, the one to break the bad news (no more Netflix) to the family, the one to find ways to cut corners (no more meat in the soup). She is the brave face, the bearer of bad news, and the decision maker all while being left in the dark by her husband of his plan for their family. She silently suffers emotional whiplash from her partner while he excludes her from choices that will alter her existence. For a film titled No Other Choice, she is the only one who accepts to make a choice regardless of the personal repercussions she’ll face. 

Marty Supreme is not focused on motherhood as a core story as it’s Marty’s story through and through (as it should be), but it’s impossible to pick up the foils to his character. Rachel (Odessa A’zion) is forced to deal with her pregnancy essentially on her own until Marty (Timothée Chalamet) accepts the responsibility at his own pace. With Rachel, her character is constructed to always be thinking of how to be in Marty’s life, how to act to get his attention, but this crippling fear of aging out of her dream;  while we see her dream as being with Marty, given the setting of the film, it’s easy to feel the weight of her dream being what was pushed onto women so visibly in this time, get married and start a family. Contrasting with a younger Rachel is a more mature Kay Stone (a brilliant Gwyneth Paltrow). Kay’s entire structure mirrors Marty’s story and Rachel’s predicament. Kay gave up her dream as a successful actress, settled down, got married and had a family, and at what cost? She’s no longer the desirable young woman to audiences and has been on a hiatus, when she returns, she’s older and not what general audiences want from stars. Kay is the perfect foil to Marty, she represents his biggest fear if he gives up the dream he’s chased for years. When Kay looks at Marty, she sees the chance she gave up. Women then weren’t able to be arrogant in their attitudes of being the best and focusing on their careers and dreams (on some level today, still cannot be in the same vein as a man). Women were expected to be courteous, accepting of their roles and polite in supporting their husbands. Kay on some level resents Marty for the dream he’s chasing and passion he has on his quest to achieve it, but she also admires him for the exact same aspect. You can be so dialed in on what you want, the desperation to be the best, but is it truly a dream or is it just ambition driving a goal? The weight of this concept of dream versus goal all comes down on Marty in the final moments and I do personally think it is up for debate what he’s feeling in that moment. Is his unrealized dream of being the best disappearing before his eyes? Is it both? Or is Marty simply seeking solace in the idea of family because his dream burst before his eyes? There’s a different kind of desperation in his eyes and it turns into acceptance and love yet mixed with a confusion. It is never simply acceptable to say ‘what about me and my dreams’ when family is on the table. Your life is never about you again but when you can dream big, can you have it all?

While One Battle After Another is a film about much bigger themes and mostly a father-daughter story, the storyline of Perfidia Beverly Hills (Academy Award Nominee Teyana Taylor) is what has only grown on me as time goes on and with each rewatch. Her journey as a woman trying to navigate what it means to be both an individual and a mother. She has no support around her that understands this internal struggle that leads to a clear untreated postpartum depression. Without someone seeing her and this depression, she leans into the identity of revolutionary. She hears her own family saying she never wanted this child, she never wanted to be a mother. Postpartum depression is such a mental weight, if you feel an easy way out, you’re going to take it. For Perfidia, that’s running and that’s what she feels is the only choice she’s allowed to make. No one is helping her through this depression; to see that love she has for her daughter. The early montage of her and Pat/”Bob” (Leonardo DiCaprio) and their daughter shows Pat looking lovingly at the baby, but this is all about perspective. We are being told that Perfidia is leaving this behind willingly when she doesn’t even know she can find a way to be both a revolutionary and a mother with the right support, which Pat is, we just don’t see either of them given a chance to explore these new roles within their lives. The entire film focuses on the younger generation taking charge, that the fight never ends, and a new generation will lead the way. This is completely heightened by Perfidia’s letter “Bob” gives their daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti) at the very end. “Are you happy? Do you have love? Will you try to change the world like I did?” She itched to be in her daughter’s life but couldn’t understand that love, the weight of that responsibility until it was too late. She never lost that love, she held onto it the entire time. If we’re focusing on parental relationships, One Battle is definitely a story most moving regarding fathers and daughter bonds but this moment that we didn’t physically get between Willa and Perfidia is so emotionally charged, I carry it with me. The weight of a mother’s love is so palpable here and I tear up just at the thought of it. The care both Paul Thomas Anderson and Taylor have for Perfidia is unmatched, one of the best original characters in quite some time. 

For me, the motherhood film of the year was Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. My brilliant friend, Kelsey, saw this when it premiered at Sundance and immediately called it ‘Uncut Gems for women’ and boy, was she right. I have always tried to describe motherhood as the scene in Gems with Howie trying to fix the buzz-in lock with the magnet and everyone yelling over him, asking for different things only Howie could answer. This overstimulating situation where you feel you’re being pulled in a million directions and everyone asking so much of you but you’re failing everywhere, that is how motherhood feels. Bronstein embodies that into a film with a tour-de-force performance from Academy Award Nominee Rose Byrne. I think I connected with this film the most of all the films tackling motherhood last year because this feels most in line with the stage of motherhood I’m at currently. I’m not freshly postpartum, I’m not pregnant, etc. I have a toddler on the cusp of elementary school, and I have a full-time job, I feel I’m constantly cutting time between work and at her school, so I feel like a failure in both directions. Being a working mother is balancing that while also trying to be your own person. The dream becomes just driving in silence or taking a 20 minute everything shower or lying in bed scrolling your phone without thinking about the hundreds of chores you could be doing. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is the definitive modern film on motherhood with no support. While Linda (Byrne) is slightly unhinged and does some questionable things, it is entirely reasonable she got to this point. There are two specific brilliant things Bronstein does here with both the child and husband, we never see them until the end. They’re just noise in Linda’s life. In the film at one point it’s asked, “What is the difference between a regular mom making a shitty choice and a straight-up shitty mom?” I think about this all the time not only as myself but the way I see people online talk about mothers, intentional or not. When Linda says, “This isn’t what it’s supposed to be like. This isn’t it. This can’t be it,” I genuinely teared up because I cannot tell you how many times I’ve said this to myself sobbing in my car from work to my daughter’s school or when I’m getting yelled at over something I forgot to do because I was devoting my energy to something else. 

In large part, I think the vulnerable conversation about how hard it is to yearn for motherhood but also want to hold on to your identity has taken on new life since Charli xcx dropped ‘I think about it all the time.’ While it’s easy to dismiss for some, the itching to maintain your sense of self and freedom but also have a family feels overwhelming, especially for women. Would it make me miss all my freedom? Would it give my life a new purpose? Being a mother is the most rewarding thing on earth, but the responsibility is unrelenting with how heavy it is. On top of the draining feeling of your own identity slipping through your fingers. You identify as mother first, you put their life vest on first. It’s not even taking into account that parents are presently forced to figure out how to be a comfort to their child given all that we see in the news and that our children are going to live in the world shaped by what is happening now. All of these stories reflect how badly mothers need support, need someone to truly see them, listen to them and understand them.