In this recurring column, Another Gaze writers Katherine Connell and Esmé Hogeveen explore a theme shared between recent releases. This time, Esmé and Katie’s conversation focuses on maternal unravelling in Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick Youand Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love (both 2025).

There is a mounting sense of rupture in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Linda (Rose Byrne) is grappling with personal and professional instability, administering therapy to her patients while also caring for her unnamed child, who is fed through a feeding tube. Co-parenting responsibilities are unevenly shared with her husband, who is largely absent. Early in the film, a pipe bursts in their Montauk apartment, creating a chasmic hole in the ceiling that becomes a source of obsessive fascination.

When Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and her partner Jackson (Robert Pattinson) relocate to rural Montana in Die My Love, their subsequent pregnancy catalyses in Grace increasingly volatile, transgressive behaviour: compulsive masturbation, sudden bouts of aggression, violence towards the environment around her. Throughout the film, images of a forest fire – strongly suggested to have been started by Grace – evoke the intensity of her rage, desire and disintegration.

Esmé: I want to start with the hole in the ceiling in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, because, very early on in the film, that’s where I got stuck. To me, the hole imagery felt obvious – almost clumsily so – and I couldn’t tell whether we were supposed to read it symbolically or materially. How did you reckon with it?

Katie: I kept oscillating between reading the hole as a metaphor and as a real problem. I don’t think the film ever properly commits to either. Then there’s the final scene of the film, when Linda runs into the ocean at night. We’re given these primordial images of motherhood as swamp, as origin. If, on top of all of that, we are to read the hole as feminine ‘lack’, these are some of the most time-worn and essentialist maternal symbols out there. And they just sort of hang there. I actually found the material stress of the hole much more compelling than its allegorical implications.

Esmé: As the film went on, I became more focused on the feeding tube than the hole as a symbol – partly, I think, because of personal factors. As you know, my mom had a feeding tube before she died, and, in cinema, the image of a feeding tube is much rarer than the image of a hole. It made me think about umbilical cords and the question of how long a mother is responsible for her child. Forever? It also made me think about the implications of nourishment not coming via the mouth, and that displacement of eating, care and intimacy.

We can also consider the tube in terms of porous boundaries, and what enters the body versus what’s rejected. Is the stoma technically a wound? Is it an opening? Does it connect to those second-wave notions of a hole or a lack as symbolic of the feminine, or to something like Kristeva’s post-structural theories of leakage? I think these are potent questions in and of themselves, and I appreciated that both films ultimately refuse simplistic or moralising conclusions, but what the films do with these symbols felt a bit underwhelming.

Beyond the water gushing into Linda’s apartment, If I Had Legs includes sequences in which the hole in the ceiling transforms into a starry galaxy, as if to link Linda to something cosmic. I wasn’t sure whether this was meant to signal dissociation or a connection to universal forces, but I found the earthbound tensions far more compelling. Linda’s stress is domestic, urgent, and produced by interpersonal dynamics. For me, the film would have been more powerful if the hole had remained an everyday problem – something materially difficult to fix – rather than tipping into sci-fi or surrealism. Introducing this, ‘Is this reality?’ question felt predictably A24; the situation of a working mother managing a domestic crisis with an absent co-parent is already tense enough.

Katie: Totally. Navigating a landlord problem is sufficiently fraught.

Esmé: The ‘real’ facts of Linda’s life are already incredibly stressful. She’s trying to communicate with contractors who don’t take her seriously, who don’t clearly answer her questions about the cause of the ceiling collapse and the timeline for fixing it. Something perverse happens whereby the domestic realm – coded as Linda’s responsibility, especially since her husband only returns in the film’s final minutes – becomes alien to her, and she’s prevented from participating in her own apartment’s repair as an equal. When her husband finally arrives, he is able to connect with the contractors and reach a resolution almost immediately, underscoring how that exclusion may have a gendered dimension, or perhaps reflecting the ways in which Linda is not able to resolve things in her perpetual state of hyper-divided attention.

Katie: Some of the abstract symbolic dimensions distracted me from what If I Had Legs does well, which is to represent the stress of working while parenting a sick child. It does this through an aesthetic of overstimulating, inescapable claustrophobia: strange angles, tight frames, and the fact that we hear the child incessantly and annoyingly vocalising throughout the film, but her face is hidden until the very end.

I see If I Had Legs as part of an uptick in popular movies since 2017 that depict white mothers in hetero marriages being driven to madness by interlinked social and domestic pressures. I don’t want to dismiss the film as superficial, or trying to capitalise on a trend, but it nonetheless feels similar to certain Hollywood movies that have superficially engaged with the post-MeToo, Trumpian landscape. Tonally, Nightbitch [2024] seems to be the most cited point of comparison here, but we might as well mention Tully [2018], A Simple Favor [2018] or Swallow [2019]. Honestly, I’d maybe even include The Lost Daughter [2021] and Babygirl [2024] in this.

These films use some horror and thriller genre cues in order to stoke dread. In those films, these cues are less about subversive risk-taking and instead often default to containers for allegorical, broad stroke, pseudo-feminist commentary. This commentary is weakened by the fact that the women protagonists, in their unravelling, never become truly monstrous, by which I mean unrelatable or unsympathetic to audiences. There’s an unwillingness on the part of the filmmakers to go beyond a generic and prettified, ‘Isn’t being a mom tough?’ paradigm, which I might read as a form of artistic cowardice. Do you think there is true ugliness in either If I Had Legs or Die My Love?

Esmé: I wanted to ask you about monstrosity, so I’m glad you brought it up. I was interested in the ways both films negotiated the social taboo around bad mothering, which is so strong. Though Linda and Grace both struggle with their own wellbeing, we never really see them as angry or neglectful mothers.

In Die My Love, the only explicit glimpses we have of questionable mothering come right at the beginning of the film, when Grace briefly leaves her baby alone with a knife and birthday cake, and later when Grace and her husband Jackson leave the baby at home to take a drive. Both scenes are alarming. There are myriad reasons why mothers have to leave their babies alone: emergencies, or a lack of resources for childcare. Leaving an infant alone is taboo, but surely it must happen.

Katie: Both films seem scared to violate a cultural demand that mothers not display real resentment towards their children and their circumstances. In If I Had Legs, Linda – a therapist working with struggling mothers, including one who abandons her child – watches televised trial footage of mothers who are convicted criminals, and she does so with the spellbound fascination of entering an abject internet rabbit hole. So the film toys with the idea of contemptible mothers, even if Linda doesn’t become one herself. While I’m disappointed in the ways the film introduces these ideas only to shy away from them, I am interested in the therapeutic space as another site of chaos rather than healing.

In contrast to Linda, Grace is a writer who seems to have given up on her work. Ramsay is really drawn to characters who are writers who don’t write or no longer write. They figure in both Morvern Callar [2002] and We Need to Talk About Kevin [2011]. While the film mentions Grace's writer's block in snippets of dialogue, it doesn't seem to say much beyond a basic point: that by having children women often surrender their passions. Are Grace’s outbursts those of a stifled creative mind? We don’t learn a lot about who she is outside of her present situation.

Esmé: That reminds me of something you recently said about Miranda July’s All Fours [2024]. That novel explicitly explores how sexual and creative fulfilment might co-exist with motherhood. On the other hand, If I Had Legs and Die My Love aren’t about fulfilment so much as survival and the complex relationship between maternal mental health and caregiving.

If Grace really does ignite a forest fire at the end of Die My Love – if those sequences are not a dream or a fantasy – then the film depicts actions that I’d argue are objectively quite monstrous. But Ramsay’s depiction of parenting itself is surprisingly chaste in its execution.

Katie: Not only chaste, but very stylish. Something that really struck me about Die My Love was its aestheticisation. For me, the whole film resembled a music video, and it seemed at odds with Ramsay’s work to date. Even when Grace is violently unravelling, her lips are perfectly glossed. The lush cinematography, the opening in which Grace and Jackson are crawling in the grass and playing tigers, the dreamscapes, the perfectly placed glitter on Grace’s lips at the wedding – it’s a fashion fantasy: Taylor Swift’s folklore meets Mad Men’s Betty Draper crying in a polka-dot dress.

Esmé: One million percent. The wedding feels almost self-consciously stylised, as if Grace is performing rather than inhabiting country-wife femininity. She’s wearing a 1950s-style prom dress; guests sport cowboy hats and the retro folk-country duet ‘In Spite of Ourselves’ plays. Grace’s drunken collapse at the reception underscores the tension between the surface beauty of the scene and the instability that underlies it. This vision of marriage – simultaneously idyllic and broken – is adjacent to a trad-wife aesthetic in which vintage femininity, pastoral Americana and feminine excess coexist. I thought the protagonists’ beauty in both films offered a kind of moral exceptionalism: buffering their volatility and recoding it as something tragic or alluring. Without that aesthetic cushioning, the films might actually be repellent.

Katie: And more challenging. I kept thinking of Ramsay’s earlier, lower-budget films, Morvern Callar and Ratcatcher [2009], in which everything is tinged with dirt, and I was baffled and disappointed by the glossiness of Die My Love. There’s a sinister, Gothic quality to the house, but it is beautiful: particularly when it is so tidily made up at the end of the film.

Esmé: I’m curious about the role of secondary characters and how each film poses the question of maternal allyship. Jackson’s mother, Pam [Sissy Spacek], is concerned about Grace but she also embodies a generational perspective that seems to accept marital and maternal suffering as part of womanhood. In a cis-het context, who is a mother’s ally? Her husband? Her baby? Other women? Do you think the women in these films have allies? They both seem incredibly isolated.

Katie: Well, that’s just it. I found the isolation dramatically interesting but unrealistic. Despite employing really famous male actors, the men are also under-sketched, but not in a way that seems to be making an intentional point about how supporting roles for women are often written.

Esmé: I thought Die My Love was going to be a two-hander, but it’s really a JLaw vehicle. I didn’t think much about Pattinson’s character after watching, which might be part of the problem. Jackson’s not a bad person and he doesn’t call Grace crazy. He tries to help his wife, sort of, or at least he seeks help from his mother. [Laughs.] So the bar is pretty low. But it did feel very 2025 to see a husband demonstrate some awareness about mental health, while still feeling ultimately unsure about what to do.

Katie: Jackson’s lack of awareness is the problem. He brings a puppy home when Grace is barely coping with a newborn.

Esmé: And Grace is so obviously a cat person. She prowls.

Speaking of animals, the violence towards the dog in Die My Love really upset me. I read the puppy as a stand-in for the baby – innocent, noisy and relentlessly demanding. Like the whining child in If I Had Legs, the puppy’s barking becomes almost unbearable. While the audience might want the noise to stop, both films insist that the source of the irritation isn’t to blame. Instead, responsibility falls to the mother, who’s expected to regulate not only herself but the entire household. In this way, both films expose how maternal frustration is frequently pathologised and punished, even as they ask the viewer to sit with the discomfort that produces those punitive impulses in the first place

Katie: Children and animals are shorthand for innocence. Wanting them to stop makes the viewer feel that they’ve transgressed something.

Esmé: That connects to how narrow our tolerance for maternal ambivalence is. Something as banal as maternal irritation or boredom – like in Rachel Cusk’s memoir A Life’s Work [2001] – still reads as scandalous. Reality itself becomes offensive.

Katie: So that transgression gets displaced into genre – horror, dystopia. The TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale [2017–2025], for all its issues, at least grapples with the horror and fetishisation of maternity. If I Had Legs comes close to making the child genuinely repellent, which is a daring choice – but the ending reassures us. Even films that flirt with monstrous motherhood tend to soften it with empathy or redemption. When we see the daughter’s face at the end of If I Had Legs, it appears she hasn’t been irrevocably physically harmed, despite Linda removing her feeding tube against the doctor’s orders. The image is both reassuring for the audience and redeems Linda as a mother. I wonder whether it's actually possible to depict a truly monstrous mother without softening that image and eventually consoling the viewer. It made me think of a horror film about motherhood from the past year: in Michael Philippou and Danny Philippou’s Bring Her Back [2025], the mother [Sally Hawkins] is truly evil and does monstrous things, but again there’s a predictably empathetic framework because we see her as grief-stricken at the loss of her child.

Genre filmmaking seems to have more often captured the dystopic project of parenthood in dynamic ways. There are less exposed arthouse examples from the year, like Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s The Ice Tower [2025],where maternal longing is portrayed as desire, fear, and repulsion, projected by a parentless adolescent onto an adult woman. It’s all captured through a fantastical mise en abyme that oscillates between dream and reality. Even though the ideas aren’t necessarily new, it’s a fairly unique, daring treatment of maternal dynamics.

Esmé: Another major, recent example of a ‘mother film’ is Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet [2025], which I found frustrating. I thought Jessie Buckley’s performance as Agnes, William Shakespeare’s wife, was incredible, but the film’s striving for profundity became trying. Zhao powerfully conveys maternal anguish, but that evocation of sadness alone didn’t feel especially revelatory. Like, how could the loss of a child not be devastating? I wanted Hamnet to be more contained. It might have focused on the transformative toll of motherhood and explored Agnes’s confinement and her lineage more deeply, rather than leaning on underdeveloped symbols like the tree knoll – another hole image!

Katie: Compared with If I Had Legs and Die My Love, Hamnet does gesture towards the potential of retaining wildness through motherhood, rather than losing it entirely or unsuccessfully repressing it.

Esmé: Today, parenting does feel like a dystopic project, despite the eternal association between infants and nascent potential. Whether it’s microplastics, climate change, or systemic sociopolitical oppression, the forces shaping a child’s trajectory in 2026 seem overwhelmingly stacked against them, or at least against any child who isn’t a billionaire’s heir. [Laughs.] More broadly, I’m curious about how culture values – or pretends to value – children’s lives. Living through another year of the genocide in Palestine, witnessing the deliberate slaughter, torture and starvation of children, makes me question whether our collective sense of children’s sanctity has shifted. Add in the ongoing exploitation and abuse of children in Sudan and Congo alongside the Epstein revelations implicating world leaders and other global figures in trafficking, and it’s hard to maintain the pretence that children’s lives are sacred. On top of that, the far right often mobilises arguments around ‘the safety of our children’ to justify racist and anti-immigrant agendas. If rhetoric around children’s sanctity existed superficially in the past, it increasingly feels like it’s being actively undermined – or weaponised – at multiple levels of culture. I want a film that engages with this hypocrisy more directly.

Katie: And does so without turning the child into a symbol – of purity, of the future – as the right has always done. Cinema as an image-based medium really struggles with this.

Esmé: Exactly. Innocence is inconvenient. Children are innocent and messy and gross and annoying. We needed to sit in the ick more.

Katie: That’s where something honest might emerge.