Over the past two years, my colleagues and I have discussed how the horror genre visualizes female anxiety about body autonomy. With the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, it was no secret why the horror trend continued in 2023 and 2024 with films like Immaculate and The First Omen, narratives where the fear of forced birth or demon children emphasized societal anger and fear over the decision.
With 2025 coming to a close, many of the most talked-about films of the year pivot not around body autonomy—or the choice to have children—but rather motherhood itself. Notably, these films don’t detail the beauty of motherhood or its joys but rather focus on supposed shortcomings, failures, and fears. So after a year of thrillers, dramas, and a lot of tears, one must ask: Why are so many bad moms on the screen?
When I use the term “bad moms,” I’m not saying that a mother who loses a child, has a sick child, or who suffers from post-partum or anxiety is a bad mother. That’s reductive. Rather, I use this term to refer to the self-reflexive thinking in which many women, including these characters, blame themselves for the experiences above. It’s about the feeling that they are bad at motherhood. And this feeling, though completely untrue, kept showing up time and time again in 2025.
These negative experiences associated with motherhood are further broken down into two categories: What happens to the mother and what happens to the child? On screen, both represent a broader societal anxiety around whether or not to have children, primarily targeted at younger women. To further explain, I look at some of the years’ most talked about titles: One Battle After Another, Hamnet, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Die My Love, and Left-Handed Girl.
What Will Happen to Me?
There are inevitable changes many women encounter when they carry a child: weight gain, hair loss, stretch marks, cramps, fatigue, etc. The physicality of having children has been addressed in comedies such as Juno (2007), Knocked Up (2007), and What to Expect When You’re Expecting (2012), but this year’s films deviated from those dramas and rom-coms by venturing into the uncharted waters of change after the child arrives.
Some films have hesitantly waded into the mental aspect of motherhood, notably 2018’s Tully. And while such movies tackle the changes women experience as they take on new responsibilities, I find that the films of 2025, both those that are directly about motherhood and those that are not, address the looming question many women unselfishly have, perhaps even subconsciously, when they get pregnant: What will happen to me?
Lynne Ramsay tackles this question head-on with Die My Love, as we watch Jennifer Lawrence struggle and slowly unravel under the weight of post-partum psychosis. In a similar vein, Rose Byrne in If I Had Legs I Would Kick You cracks under the pressure of taking care of her sick child, looming with unresolved or untreated post-partum and anxiety. Both films wade into horror, thriller, and dark-comedy tropes, directly alluding to the anxiety of being unable to care for oneself stemming from becoming a mother. Will I be able to handle it?
The women in these films are struggling, both with their partners and with their support systems. They depict isolation, anger, anxiety, and how even the most capable, loved, and supported women can break. And both of their endings are representative of an unraveling beyond repair or a final attempt to take agency back and control their narrative ending.
Both If I Had Legs I Would Kick You and Die My Love wade into extreme (but not completely fantastical) territory. But the question of what will happen to oneself doesn’t always revolve around the worst-case scenarios. Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia Beverley Hills in One Battle After Another alludes to the anxiety of losing one’s passions and purpose after motherhood, again leading her to make a decision in an attempt to control her story and regain agency.
When I would talk to friends about choosing to have children in their 20s versus late 30s or early 40s, they always had the same answer: I want to enjoy myself and have them out of the house by 50. And while I hate to burst the bubble that all children magically move out at 18, I was more interested in this idea that many people believe “it’s all over” once you have children. Now, you can no longer enjoy the things you love to do.
The same logic applies to my friends who chose not to have kids young, or at all, claiming that they don’t want to lose the lives they have now. As an avid traveler and ‘spur of the moment’ person, I feel this level of anxiety when thinking about children—will I no longer get to be the person I am? Do I have to give up all the things I love to do?
Perfidia, looped into a much larger, complex situation and plot, represents this anxiety. While pregnant, onlookers comment that she ‘forgets that she is a mother,’ as she, in an iconic shot, blasts semi-automatic weapons. An avid revolutionary, Perfidia refuses to give up this part of herself, ultimately leaving her daughter with Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio). After she is placed on house arrest and later flees the US, Perfidia can no longer return to her daughter, but, as the final sequence reveals, love is not lost.
While this is a more extreme version of visualized anxiety, the point still stands: some women are afraid of losing themselves after they become mothers. Perfidia chose to leave because she refused to lose a part of herself—a choice made on the grounds of a real fear that causes some women not to have children. Lawrence’s Grace and Byrnes’ Linda chose their endings after losing parts of themselves.
In all cases—Grace, Linda, and Perfidia—no one understands them or just how deep their worries go. They are isolated, alone, and the question is answered: What will happen to me? Well, there just might not be any of you left. So, after experiencing what these women go through, one may just ask: Would it have been better if they hadn’t had their children?
But What About the Child?
Despite the many anxieties a woman may have about herself, motherhood is, ultimately, a selfless act. Thus, there is infinitely more concern about the well-being of the child. If I become a mother, how will I protect my child?
All of the films above address both the anxiety about the mother and the anxiety about the child. The worry that you are not good enough to care for or protect your child, or the fear and blame you have when you have a sick child or a child in trouble. If I Had Legs I Would Kick You, Hamnet, and Left-Handed Girl take a step further, putting focus on specific situations that mothers fear.
Left-Handed Girl, the only film representative of an eastern culture, follows a Taiwanese family of a single mother and her two daughters struggling to run a noodle shop and adapt to the busy city of Taipei. It’s a wonderful exploration of the lengths mothers will go to protect their children. Without spoiling the film’s important revelation, Left-Handed Girl explores a mother who is anxious about the societal expectations placed on her children, and the tension between protecting and not being able to protect your child from the outside world.
Both If I Had Legs and Hamnet tackle this angle from a more physical experience: How will I protect my child if he/she get sick? We always hear the obligatory “We don’t care if it’s a boy or a girl, as long as they are healthy.” But what if they aren’t?
If I Had Legs tackles the reality of caring for a chronically ill child, the pressure and painful longing for them to get better. The frustration as a parent is only amplified by the situation. The film strategically focuses on Byrne and her struggle with this reality, inventively withholding her child’s face throughout. There is laser focus on the mother, with empathy for her struggles as she tries to care for her child.
In a similar vein, Hamnet, a fantastical account of the origins of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” is almost a culmination of all these earlier ideas. Chloé Zhao’s film follows Agnes (Jessie Buckley) from young womanhood to marriage, to pregnancy and birth, to having three children, something she is painfully anxious about. Ultimately, Agnes is faced with the worst tragedy imaginable: the loss of a child. Pain, anger, depression, and contempt follow as she struggles with her grief and pain—something all mothers inescapably fear.
While most women may not enter pregnancy with the fear that they might lose their child, the anxiety is there. Beyond high-risk pregnancies, I speak to some people who say they don’t want to have children because of the world—wars, politics, climate change, gun violence, lack of healthcare, or a combination of those aspects makes some people believe that they can’t protect their children. And to avoid the fate Agnes endured, they chose not to start a family.
All of the films above had motherhood at their center, but these themes also bleed into many other 2025 films.
Julia Roberts found herself as a mentor and maternal figure to Ayo Edebiri’s Margaret in After the Hunt, exposing how the anxieties women have about men can bleed into how they treat their daughters or other women. Motherhood was used manipulatively in Hedda, revealing her insecurities about her character or her understanding of its shocking nature to others when she was thought to be pregnant.
Fatherhood was also put on display in Train Dreams, Steve, Roofman, Highest 2 Lowest, and, again, One Battle After Another, exposing a reality that these larger societal anxieties are not necessarily exclusive to women.
While details can continue to be extracted, I find it most important to focus on two central themes: these films are becoming more apparent and are getting noticed. Of the films listed above, seven are Golden Globe Nominees. All premiered at major film festivals, and some are expected to receive Best Picture nominations. We are not tackling feminine anxieties in underground cinemas, barely read columns, or smaller independent projects—these films are shocking, bold, new, and address hard-to-visualize concepts with empathy and realism.
In that of itself, it is a triumph that so many women-led, written, directed, and focused films are entering a canon of greatness. But to my originally proposed question: Why are so many bad moms on the screen? I argue that these ‘bad’ moms, or rather, complex, struggling, never-before-seen moms, are representative of the younger generation of women.
Yes, the mothers in the audience, I have no doubt, will be moved by these films, perhaps even perplexed to finally see pieces of themselves on the screen never before visualized in major motion pictures. That is a fantastic trend to see: women having more space to share experiences honestly on screen. But I argue that this trend of anxiety about motherhood is more directed to younger women, those just beginning to start their family, and those not yet ready to take that step. As we enter adulthood, grow up, and ask whether and when we are ready to have children, the questions these films raise arise: what will happen to me, and what will happen to my child? Will I be able to handle it? Will I be able to protect them?
This essay is not ‘anti-mother’ or ‘anti-children,’ nor am I saying all women are doomed to extreme depression, anxiety, or untreatable psychosis when they have children. But with so many non-comedies coming out, focusing on women and their relationship to motherhood and themselves, one can’t help but notice that, just maybe, we need to look at motherhood and what women go through in a different, honest, hard-to-watch fashion. And with fewer women having children, maybe we need to ask why. Our films reflect this conversation.
For younger women, these films represent the reality that motherhood goes beyond physical changes and pain; it is transformative, scary, and a sacrifice. As we have seen in the films of 2025, motherhood is entering a new realm of extreme vulnerability, one that is now being reconciled visually. This year’s biggest films are now forcing those visuals to the forefront, and now we just have to hope people will listen.
Essay Courtesy of Sara Ciplickas
Feature Image Designed by Sara Ciplickas