The Horrors of Motherhood
Within the past 12 months, at least 3 major film releases have focused on female characters who don't want to be, or should never have become, mothers.
2 of those 3 films are ones I saw within the last month.
OTHER MOMMY and VERITY.
The third is: DIE MY LOVE.
While these films approach motherhood from very different angles, they share a fascinating thread I haven't seen in mainstream movies before: women who are struggling with motherhood, and the damage that struggle causes to themselves and their children.
These aren't stories about mothers who make a questionable decision, learn a valuable lesson, and emerge with a newfound appreciation for their children. These women are complicated -- sometimes sympathetic, and sometimes downright evil.
But I think these stories are doing something more than just showcasing the potential horrors of motherhood.
They're showing the dangers of ignoring your own instincts and succumbing to external pressures that alter your life in ways you weren't prepared for or never wanted in the first place.
Which is an incredibly important message particularly for women today. For most of human existence, we've been told our role as women is to be a caretaker for a man and the children you have with him.
And while plenty of women genuinely do want children, there are plenty that don't. It may seem like more of those women exist today, but that's only because in recent years we have the freedom to NOT choose that life for ourselves.
Lots of women over the course of history never wanted kids but had them anyway because that's what they were told they were supposed to do.
And just because it's more acceptable and accessible now to exist as a woman without children, that doesn't mean the societal pressure isn't still there.
What happens when you give into it, either because that's what you believe you're supposed to do, or because you're actively silencing the voice inside you that's screaming "I DON'T WANT THIS!"?
Let's get into it!
OTHER MOMMY: WHAT IF YOUR MOM NEVER WANTED YOU?
In OTHER MOMMY, 7-year-old Bela's relationship with her mother, Ursula, is already tense when she begins encountering a supernatural entity that looks just like her mom ("Other Mommy").
The entity tells Bela that her real mother never wanted her to exist, which is why their relationship is strained.
Throughout the film, we see evidence of this.
Ursula frequently ignores Bela's bids for attention, often keeping herself busy with work or the man she's cheating on her husband with while her husband takes on the majority of parenting responsibilities.
In order to destroy "Other Mommy," Ursula must admit the truth to Bela: she never wanted to have her, and when she became pregnant, she saw it as the loss of her freedom.
It's interesting because Ursula isn't the monster in the literal sense -- the supernatural entity terrorizing her daughter is the immediate threat. But the entity embodies Ursula's deep-seated resentment.
The entity weaponizes that truth to hurt Bela, turning her mother's private regret into a child's worst nightmare.
But not wanting to become a mother doesn't automatically make someone a bad mom.
Ursula's regret isn't, by itself, what makes her a troubling character. It's what happens when that regret affects the way she treats her daughter.
There's something particularly cruel about Bela having to confront the fact that her mother's unhappiness has so much to do with her existence.
A child can't help being born. They can't make their parent happy, fix their relationship, or give back the life their parent feels they've lost.
But Bela is the one who has to live with the consequences of Ursula's decision.
In the end, the supernatural threat is defeated, and the family appears picture-perfect again. But Bela notices signs that her mother's unhappiness is still very much alive and lurking beneath her fake smile.
The monster may be gone, but the circumstances that manifested it haven't disappeared.
This film makes us confront the damage a mother's unhappiness can cause without making the mother herself the central villain. Instead, the monster becomes the embodiment of a truth the family would rather not face.
Which is far more disturbing than a story in which the antagonist is simply a villain.
VERITY: WHAT IF YOUR MOM WANTED YOU DEAD?
VERITY takes the unwanted motherhood premise somewhere considerably darker.
Verity, a bestselling author who's supposedly incapacitated after an accident, can't complete her next book, so her husband, Jeremy, hires another author, Lowen, to ghostwrite it.
While staying in Verity's home, Lowen discovers an unfinished autobiography in which Verity documents her life since meeting Jeremy. She expresses her hatred of being pregnant and her growing resentment toward her children for taking attention away from her husband.
According to the manuscript, Verity intentionally capsized a canoe to drown her 2 children, successfully killing her daughter.
The manuscript also suggests that Verity attempted suicide to avoid facing the consequences, hence her current incapacitation.
So, naturally, Verity is a monster, right?
Well, we come to learn that the manuscript may have just been part of a writing exercise to get Verity into a villain headspace for her next novel, and that her child's death truly was an accident. But when her husband discovered the novel, he tried to kill her but was ultimately unsuccessful, leaving her incapacitated.
In this version of the story, Jeremy is clearly the villain.
But what if what we were originally told to believe was true?
In my eyes, Jeremy is still the villain in many ways.
What role did the expectations placed on Verity play in the person she became?
Her manuscript portrays pregnancy and motherhood as things she hated but went through with to appease her husband, while her children become competition for the attention and affection she desperately wants from him.
That of course doesn't excuse her potentially murdering her kid -- but imagine if she had never felt the pressure to have kids just to keep Jeremy interested in the first place.
Imagine if Jeremy loved her for who she was instead of what she could do for him.
This is why I still see Jeremy as a villain. Despite Verity's clear disinterest in being pregnant / being a mother, he pushes her to do these things for him by ONLY giving her attention in the moments where she's doing exactly what he wants.
So we're not just looking at a woman who might be evil.
We're looking at a woman whose experience of motherhood, relationship with her husband, and possible capacity for cruelty are all tangled together.
And if the manuscript truly was a writing exercise and Jeremy is the "big bad," then Verity's story becomes something else entirely: a story about what happens when a woman's account of her own life is discredited, and the person closest to her is the one controlling the narrative.
Who's the real monster? The woman who might have tried to kill her children, or the man who might have tried to kill his wife?
The film leaves us to decide the truth.
DIE MY LOVE: WHAT IF MOTHERHOOD DESTROYED YOU?
DIE MY LOVE takes a much more psychologically intimate approach to motherhood.
Grace moves from New York to rural Montana with her partner, Jackson, who has inherited a house from his late uncle. They have a baby, and what initially seems like a happy, playful relationship begins to deteriorate as Grace becomes increasingly isolated and responsible for maintaining the family and house while Jackson spends long stretches away working.
She realizes quickly that motherhood isn't all it's cracked up to be.
Her child is constantly crying and she has no idea what it wants.
Jackson brings home a dog that never shuts up, and of course it becomes Grace's responsibility to care for.
And Jackson himself is always gone, leaving Grace with no true companionship, comfort, or breaks while dealing with all of this.
What I find so interesting about the way the film presents her story is that everything around Grace becomes the antagonist.
We're not simply watching a woman behave badly and waiting for the film to punish her. We're watching her experience a life that would make anyone miserable.
Hell, I felt miserable just watching it. I even considered walking out several times, but I realized that was part of the appeal of the film: the absolute misery it makes you feel for a life that isn't even yours.
The baby isn't a villain -- it's a baby. It cries because babies cry.
The dog isn't evil for barking. Annoying, sure, but not a true antagonist in any sense.
Jackson isn't evil because he has to leave for work... He IS at least a tiny bit evil for not taking Grace's needs into consideration and putting his own comfort above all else by assuming she can handle everything while she's clearly struggling.
The film makes us sit with the relentlessness of her existence.
The demands don't stop just because she's struggling.
And as the demands increase, her suffering becomes more and more destructive.
She shoots the dog after it's hit by a car and Jackson refuses to do something about it.
She has an affair.
She throws herself through a glass door.
She hurts herself and damages the relationships around her.
We aren't asked to pretend these things are justifiable -- but we are made to understand the misery that incites them.
Even the moments that are supposed to be happy milestones for Grace feel alienating. After she's committed to a psychiatric institution and eventually returns home, the people around her congratulate her on looking healthy and well, as though she's simply recovered and can get back to normal.
But Grace doesn't feel normal, and she doesn't want the life that's waiting for her.
And the more the people around her try to slot her back into it, the more apparent it becomes that her mental health can't be resolved by a hospital stay, a remodeled house, or everyone pretending things are fine.
In the end, when Grace walks into a spreading fire she caused as Jackson chases after her, the film has taken us somewhere far removed from the idea that motherhood is an automatic source of fulfillment.
Grace never explicitly tells us that she didn't want to become a mother. But the film doesn't need her to. What it shows us is a woman falling apart under the weight of the life she's been told she should be happy in, with no easy way to separate her own psychological deterioration from the circumstances surrounding her.
Is Grace the villain? Is Jackson? Is motherhood itself? Is it the isolation, the expectations, the relationship, or the way her suffering goes unaddressed until it becomes catastrophic?
The film doesn't give us a simple answer.
Instead, it makes us feel how much Grace hates the life she's living, and the catastrophic effects that hatred causes to everyone and everything around her.
Each of these films approaches the subject differently, but they all ask the same question: what happens when motherhood isn’t the happy ending a woman was promised?
None of them gives us a simple answer about who deserves our sympathy and who deserves our condemnation. That’s part of what makes them so compelling (setting the actual quality of the films aside).
I also appreciate that these films don’t reassure us that everything eventually just works out when you decide to have kids. There’s no “But I still love my children! I don’t regret a thing!” moment.
That matters, because most media has sold motherhood as inherently rewarding for every woman.
It ISN’T, and women deserve to be told that instead of “you’ll change your mind.”
Sometimes people regret becoming parents. Sometimes parents cause real harm. Sometimes children grow up carrying the consequences of a decision they had no say in. And sometimes a woman can be suffering terribly without being innocent of the damage she causes.
That’s the uncomfortable balance these films hold -- understanding the pressures that led these women to motherhood doesn’t excuse the terrible things they do, and condemning what they do doesn’t erase the pressures that led to those choices.
The real horror isn’t just that some women regret becoming mothers. It’s that we’ve built a society where women can spend their entire lives being told motherhood is what they’re supposed to want, only to have many find themselves trapped in a life they never wanted in the first place.
And we still struggle to talk about that honestly without either demonizing women who regret it or treating their suffering as an excuse for everything they do.
These films are a step towards having that conversation. They're not saying every woman who doesn’t want children will become a monster -- they’re asking what happens when people ignore their own instincts, let societal expectations shape life-altering decisions, and leave everyone around them to absorb the consequences.
Comments