Jennifer Lawrence, Rose Byrne and the Rise of Mom Trauma Cinema

On a front porch in a decrepit Appalachian home, a new father and his infant son idle away the afternoon. The proud papa, Jackson (Robert Pattinson), beams while his child giggles at the sky. Neither seems particularly observant of Jackson’s wife, and the baby’s mother, is approaching on all fours—and in tall grass that Jackson never thinks to mow. 

This is Grace (Jennifer Lawrence), the protagonist of Lynne Ramsay’s Die, My Love. She’s also a new mother who looks at her offspring in much the same way that a jungle cat considers a gazelle before going into a crouch. The visual metaphor is not subtle, yet little is intended to be in Ramsay’s stark meditation on the epic trials, tribulations, and even traumas of motherhood.

Marketed around the obvious sexiness of Pattinson and Lawrence portraying newlyweds, Die, My Love certainly basks in that steam early on with several montages of Jackson and Grace playing house, often sans clothes. But from the first expansive wide shot of that house being discovered by a wary. expectant mother—who is practically drowning in a frame filled by debris and fallen leaves cramping what is maybe supposed to be the living room—there is a deliberate lack of bliss in this place. (We later learn that Jackson inherited the structure from his extended local family after his uncle killed himself.) It’s apparently here that Jackson has convinced Grace to move and start their family, and where he will leave her while pursuing his part-time job as a truck driver. She meanwhile must raise their child, keep the house clean, and even feed and train a dog that Jackson one day brings home—all while supposedly finding time to write. Mind, we see nary a laptop, typewriter, or even a book enter the household.

Adapted by Ramsay and playwrights Enda Walsh and Alice Birch from a novel by Ariana Harwicz, Die, My Love is one of several new films in a rising tide of cinema about the existential dread of motherhood, be it due to postpartum depression or otherwise. It’s never exactly clear if that is what gnaws at Grace, or if it is an altogether different mental illness that Jackson nor his hovering extended family notice until they’ve boxed her into the role of happy homemaker. It is just conveyed, heavily, that she is a troubled stranger in a strange land. Ramsay likewise favors a structure that is nonlinear and detached, taking on an increasingly allegorical surreality as Grace’s memories of her wedding, pregnancy, and motherhood blend and blur. Eventually she sees her son present during an extended flashback of her wedding night.

The approach gives Lawrence a mountain of material to work with, and she makes it ring true when Grace says that the only thing in her life she comes to love, in spite of the title, is her son. “He’s perfect.” And yet throughout the movie, one gets the strong sense she never had much of a vote in when or where he would be born, and with what support system. Jackson’s childhood friends and family ostensibly become Grace’s, but she goes from missing the initial carnality of their relationship—even snarking “you don’t bore me,” when he complains about her not stargazing with him, “it’s fucking everything else”—to outright resenting a man who claims he is always tired, even as he keeps a handful of condoms in his glove compartment.

As the director of You Were Never Really Here and We Need to Talk About Kevin, Ramsay is a veteran of the slow-burn and introspective character studies. And there is a lot of character for both Lawrence and Pattinson to play. Strangely though, they remain as distant as the starlight seems to Grace on that glassy night with a telescope. Everything is remote and broken. That is of course how the pair let their marriage deteriorate, and perhaps how Grace feels about everyone in her life save the child she comes to idolize, but for a film attempting to insert us into the interiority of a mother’s struggles, we nor her film ever fully internalize Grace’s point-of-view or the anxieties that ail her. Despite the movie being told through her eyes, what lies behind them remains an abstraction. Die makes the pretense of trying to help, yet a lot like the characters onscreen fails to connect with the crisis at hand.

Fortunately, Die, My Love is not the only film eager to meet the regressive cultural moment where “trad wife” hashtags and sensibilities attempt to squeeze women back into kitchens. In the last 18 months, we’ve had Amy Adams and Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch, which is a lot more conventional than that title might suggest, not to mention a pair of nun-sploitation horror movies about forced pregnancy. Of the two, it is the piece of IP extension, The First Omen, which turned out to be radically impassioned statement thanks to thrilling direction by Arkasha Stevenson and a bold performance from Nell Tiger Free.  

Almost all of these pictures are from women directors intent on dragging the cinematic language around motherhood away from iconography associated with domestic simplicity or a sense of generational conformity. The best one, however, might be another flirtation with surreality and allegory that just entered wide release last week: Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.

The A24 release stars Rose Byrne as Linda, a mother who supposedly has her life together as a successful therapist and in a loving home with her daughter (Delaney Quinn) and husband Charles (Christian Slater). Except that Charles is almost entirely off-screen, a warm if distracted voice on an iPhone as he attempts to humor his wife while working as a captain on a cruise ship. Meanwhile the aforementioned daughter is technically onscreen, but her face is never seen, nor her name uttered.

Instead this child with an undisclosed medical condition is simply a source of wants, pleads, and cries; a babe who can articulate she desires a hamster right now, or that she is hungry, but otherwise seems to offer nothing but burden and guilt to a mother who also must deal with the fact that they have to abscond to a sketchy motel after their house floods due to a burst pipe.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is another film about the traumatic stresses of motherhood, albeit at a later stage that’s far removed from what could be attributed to postpartum depression or mental disorder. In fact, as a therapist, Linda should be able to pick at what bothers her—or at least her own shrink (an intentionally unfunny and dour-faced Conan O’Brien) should. Alas, she is so distracted by the myriad horrors conspiring against her—including the paranoid-but-not-wrong suspicion her own psychiatrist might hate her guts—that she nor her film have a moment to breathe. Instead If I Had Legs flirts with horror and suspense genre conventions while immersing you so deeply into Linda’s perspective that even the source of both her panic and theoretical joy remains a faceless abstraction. But we know who and what it is, intimately.

Bronstein, who is married to screenwriter Ronald Bronstein, seems to share her husband’s affinity for turning the knife in the viewer and keeping things at an exasperated broil (Ronald co-wrote Uncut Gems). Mary also benefits greatly from the pitch-perfect casting of Byrne as Linda.

A dramatic and funny actor, Byrne is often celebrated for her versatility. Consider that she starred in generational classic Bridesmaids, Insidious, and an X-Men flick all in the same year. Linda is nonetheless the character this actor has been waiting for; a showcase of all her talents in one tour de force characterization. Linda is a deeply acerbic, burned out mess who in another era or film could have led a raunchy laugher (or at least a highbrow dinner table comedy), but here slouches one bottle at a time into an existential despair that is literalized by the gaping, moldering hole in her house.

It’s a tremendous performance and one, like the film, which invites the audience into a mother’s crucible. Among the many films dealing with the perils of maternity that well-meaning (or oafish) husbands miss, Byrne, Bronstein, and Linda force everyone to stop and gawk at what viscerally feels like a five-car pile up. It might also be a five-star triumph.

Die, My Love is in limited release right now, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is currently in wide release.