How Struggling Mothers Emerged as the Central Figures of 2025 | Vanity Fair

“Mommy is stretchable. Daddy is hard,” a child offscreen observes of her mother, Linda (Rose Byrne), and father, Charles (Christian Slater), in Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Their child means that mommy’s more “like putty,” a malleable form that can be shaped at one’s will. The camera lingers on Linda as the assessment sinks in, her teary-eyed embarrassment quickly tempered into polite, but shaky, indifference. Linda, a trained therapist, will not let her pesky emotions get in the way of a good metaphor—or her daughter’s own counseling.

Inspired by Bronstein’s own experience while caring for her sick daughter, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is among a wave of films and television series released this year that grapple with maternal dysfunction, grief, and postpartum depression. That thread ran through some of 2025’s most-talked-about movies, featuring powerful performances by Teyana Taylor in One Battle After Another, Jennifer Lawrence in Die My Love, Jessie Buckley in Hamnet, and Amanda Seyfried in both The Testament of Ann Lee and The Housemaid.

For Bronstein, the seed for that scene may have been planted when she first saw Robert Redford’s 1980 film Ordinary People. “Mary Tyler Moore gives one of the best performances ever of a mother in grief on screen. But since the movie is centered on the son [an Oscar-winning performance by Timothy Hutton], her grief is depicted as too much, an annoyance, getting in the way of the family moving on,” Bronstein tells Vanity Fair. “Where’s her space to grieve? Solution of the movie is that she goes away, and then they’re happy in the backyard, father and son. Even when I first saw that movie as a preteen, I was like, ‘Why is she the villain?’”

It’s a tale as old as time: a seemingly well-adjusted woman, say Meryl Streep in Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) or Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut (1999), expresses malaise about motherhood or marriage, then is promptly banished to the story’s sidelines. As with Ordinary People, the rest of those movies are mostly devoted to the tortured, completely indulged, and thoroughly examined feelings of Kramer’s Dustin Hoffman and Eyes Wide Shut’s Tom Cruise. “Anytime a woman in a movie is a mother, that’s usually all we find out about her,” says Bronstein. “She’s an appendage onto either the man or the child who’s the center of the story.”

The portrayal of motherhood on shows like Leave It to Beaver and The Brady Bunch, a picket fence–lined fantasy in which women are relegated to the homestead, has been hard to shake in Hollywood, says Lucy Liu, who plays a mother in crisis in Rosemead, an indie drama inspired by a tragic true story. “Women stay home and make dinner and take care of the children, while the partner is out there making money in the business suit. The pressure of that, as well as the technology that is available to children and to people in general, is kind of immersing everyone in their own world,” Liu tells VF. “And that creates an identity crisis, frankly. Women are not able to do all the things, and do it all perfectly. There’s a reality to how much one can take.”

That complex truth also permeated TV in 2025, as proven by Claire Danes’s grieving, self-destructive novelist in The Beast in Me, Nicole Beharie, whose news anchor Chris shares her pregnancy loss on this season of The Morning Show; Murdaugh: Death in the Family’s Patricia Arquette, as well as Sarah Snook and Dakota Fanning in All Her Fault, a show about one mother helping another search for her missing son.

Following its premiere in November, All Her Fault became Peacock’s most-watched original series launch ever within its first three weeks of streaming. “I’m not a confident person. I worry about everything. But when it comes to this one issue, I never had any doubt,” writer/executive producer Megan Gallagher says of her show’s resonance among women. “My brother-in-law’s mother is a hairdresser in Columbus, Ohio. She said that several clients sit in her chairs and say, ‘Have you seen All Her Fault?’ If people are sitting down in their hairdressers’ in Columbus, Ohio, and talking about the show, I think we’ve done well.”

Adapted from author Andrea Mara’s twisty mystery about a missing child, the series features Snook and Fanning as high-powered career women who feel responsible for the bulk of domestic responsibilities because of their neglectful husbands. “It all stems from this idea of entitlement that men, be it Jake Lacy [who plays husband to Snook’s character], or any of these monsters. Anytime you’re acting out that extremely, some part of you feels entitled to do so. We’ve never existed in a place where we can do batshit crazy stuff without being called batshit crazy,” Gallagher says.

It doesn’t get more evil than disgraced Southern lawyer Alex Murdaugh, who in 2023 was convicted of killing his wife, Maggie, and their 22-year-old son, Paul. In the wake of serving consecutive life sentences, Murdaugh has maintained his innocence, and his conviction is under appeal. Hulu’s Murdaugh: Death in the Family, starring Jason Clarke as Alex, is the latest in a string of projects about the case, but the first to eradicate the idea of Maggie Murdaugh as “an afterthought in her own tragedy,” says Michael D. Fuller.

Upon discovering that a Wikipedia page on the double homicide featured only a single line about Maggie, series co-creators Erin Lee Carr (documentarian of Mommy Dead and Dearest fame) and Fuller, along with Arquette as star/producer, “felt an opportunity for us to really explore: What’s the story that one sentence isn’t telling?”

It felt like familiar terrain for Fuller, who was raised by a single mother in South Carolina, only an hour away from where the Murdaughs lived. “You see it with the trad wife movement, but in the South especially, it’s still very ingrained, these expectations of who within a marriage is allowed to do what,” Fuller says of Alex and Maggie’s fractured dynamic before her murder. “When they got married, she thought she was signing up for this princessly Southern royalty lifestyle,” only to endure “this man-child who has monstrous appetites that continue to metastasize because you can’t really ever satiate the beast,” he continues.

Through his attorney, Alex told People that Fuller and Carr’s series “mischaracterizes Alex’s relationships with his wife Maggie and his son Paul, both of whom Alex loves so dearly.” To that, Fuller tells VF: “I do truly believe, to whatever extent I can understand, that he did love Maggie and Paul. I think that’s one of the reasons he can’t open that door of monstrousness to acknowledge what he did.”

In one final, prescient twist, Alex used a visit to his elderly mother, Libby, then suffering from dementia, as an alibi for the murders. “After the most dehumanizing, monstrous thing someone could do, he went and sat there with his mom,” Fuller says.

Like Alex fleeing from the darkest moments of his life and into the arms of his mother, Fuller ventures that the rocky last few years have led us back there culturally too. “We’ve been through so much in the past 10 years, particularly the past five. The collective psyche has just been so traumatized, and there’s so much uncertainty when we’re dealing with AI, what the economy’s going to look like, climate change—all these massive things,” says Fuller. “We dramatized [Paul’s older brother] Buster Murdaugh saying at the end of his father’s murder trial, ‘I just want my mom.’ There is something fundamental that a mother in the most general way provides. But what we’re seeing, with If I Had Legs I’d Kick You and Die My Love, is the burden of that on the individual.”

In a year where men channeled their inner demons into vampires (Sinners), gods (Superman), and even a new Frankenstein, motherhood served as a trippy catalyst for many writer-directors. “We are thinking about ourselves as mothers, but also our own mothers. If you have a good enough mother, those problems and demands and terrible feelings that we’re putting forth in these movies are all behind the scenes,” says Bronstein. “Those are mommy’s little secrets. Kids go to bed, wine comes out or whatever it is, but we don’t see that as kids. We don’t see all the work that goes into even something as simple as a birthday.”

The unflinching portraits of maternity have had a profound effect on mothers, but also on young people deciding whether or not to procreate. “Women are really openly expressing a total disinterest in marriage and children,” says Gallagher, citing a recent Pew Research Center study that found a 22-point drop over the last three decades in teenage girls’ desire to get married. As of 2025, teenage girls are officially less likely than teenage boys to say they want to get married. “So, it makes sense to me that we’re finally free enough perhaps to explore and say out loud that having kids isn’t for everyone, and/or you can love your kids to death and still acknowledge that the life of having kids is really hard,” she continues.

Could this recent spate of disillusioned mother narratives have anything to do with the United States government wreaking havoc on women’s reproductive rights? “I wouldn’t say it’s a hugely political show,” Gallagher says of All Her Fault. “But anytime you’re exploring women being unhappy and wanting other things in life, it tends to have a leftward leading bend, and I wish it didn’t. I wish that was more universal.”

Bronstein, who worked on If I Had Legs I’d Kick You for nearly a decade, added back in a candid line about her lead character, Linda, getting an abortion following the overturning of Roe v. Wade. While disclosing to her own therapist (Conan O’Brien) that she terminated her first pregnancy, Linda sobs, “I’d have a kid in college by now if I hadn’t done that. Maybe I got rid of the wrong one.”

Bronstein, who says she is “as pro-choice as they come,” still thought it was important to highlight the complicated feelings that can surround an abortion. “We’re in a place where women are frustrated by having the choice of whether to be a mother or not taken away from them. But at the same time, in our society, having no real support once you have that baby,” says Bronstein. “So it’s another way of communicating to women that we don’t care about you. We care about you as a vessel for giving birth.”

But that’s only the beginning of a journey that’s ripe for storytelling. “Everybody has a mother. Whether they were good, bad, absent, present, you had a mother,” says Bronstein. “So why don’t we center mothers in more stories?” She hopes that meaningfully incorporating more complex stories of motherhood won’t be too big a stretch for an industry with increasingly hard limitations. “I love that there’s so many female filmmakers telling our own stories for the first time, which feels ridiculous since it is 2025 and we are half the population. I’m hungry for it, and I know that other people are too,” says Bronstein. “I hope that if we talked again in five years, it would be like, ‘Remember we talked about how it was unusual that there were this group of movies? That was so wild. It’s not unusual now.’”

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