Beyond the Maternal Ideal: The Cinema of Crushing Motherhood

by: Elise Maynard , March 26, 2026

In the wake of renewed focus on female domestic labour within our cultural consciousness due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Olivia Landry’s The Cinema of Crushing Motherhood seeks to broaden our understanding of the emotional complexities of motherhood. Landry points to three distinct social movements as significant in the necessity of her study: the COVID pandemic, #MeToo, and Black Lives Matter—each separately exposing the need for greater discussion and scholarship on feminism and motherhood—while highlighting the pandemic as the catalyst that brought the specific labour of mothering to the forefront of culture. By engaging with what Orna Donath describes as the ‘falsely pan-class, pan-ethnic, pan-gendered phenomenon’ of the culturally constructed ‘Mother’ (Donath 2015: 343), Landry builds on the discourse that permeated social media during the pandemic and highlights specific emotions in her discussion to probe ‘the bad feelings mothers have about motherhood through recent representations in films… to paint a picture of a new cinematic moment’ (Landry 2025: 1). Landry’s inaugural argument stems from Maggie Gyllenhaal’s 2021 film The Lost Daughter, and the statement spoken by Leda, played by Olivia Coleman: ‘children are a crushing responsibility’ (Landry 2025: 1). From this point, Landry explores the word ‘crushing,’ working to define the experience through six negatively construed emotions, all of which title each chapter: Regret, Exhaustion, Rage, Shame, Guilt, and Disgust. Each highlights films that ‘unapologetically portray the experiences of the mother rather than the projection of motherhood produced by patriarchy’ (66-67).

The book is undoubtedly recommended for advanced higher-education students in media studies, politics, and gender, as well as those seeking a deeper understanding of the complexities of motherhood. Landry focuses on exposing the emotional toll of mothering and its effects on the female psyche, dismantling the institution of motherhood, and presenting a more complete reality without negating either the pain or the pleasure of parenting. Each chapter focuses on two films and academic discourse around their key emotional themes. It is a discussion of feminist cinema, purporting to investigate ‘the subjective experience of motherhood’ (2), told through and by women.

Opening with Eula Biss’s provocation that ‘women’s lives are defined by motherhood whether or not we have children’ (Biss 2021), Landry continually returns to the concept of ‘the institution of motherhood’ as the site of discourse that defines what it means to be a ‘good mother,’ and by extension, what condemns a woman as a bad one. The Cinema of Crushing Motherhood draws on arguments surrounding this binary, with the trope of the bad mother existing as a woman unbound by her children and intent on continuing the life she led prior to motherhood. However, Landry’s discussion does not negate the role of the good mother but instead focuses on the damaging effects of pursuing that ideal, arguing that the negativity comes not from the mother’s ineptitude but from the distance between the reality of mothering and the desire to embody that ideal. It is refreshing to encounter a depiction of motherhood that addresses its difficulties from a position of sympathy for the mother as a human being who exists beyond her tie to her offspring.

In ‘Regret,’ we see women expressing their loss of identity. In ‘Exhaustion,’ we see how the act of mothering wears away at the psyche, eroding the mother’s ability to perform mothering itself. In ‘Rage,’ Landry turns to Sara Ahmed’s concept of the feminist snap, as accumulated loss and exhaustion curdle into anger. ‘Shame’ explores the societal pressures bearing down on mothers through films that expose the experience of women forced to abandon their children. ‘Guilt’ examines the ever-present sense of maternal culpability that shadows even the most devoted mothering, and finally, ‘Disgust’ centres the post-partum body and the visceral, often taboo experience of becoming a mother.

In ‘Regret,’ Landry situates mothering as a real experience set against the institutionalised assumptions of what motherhood ‘should be,’ exploring the divergence between the two through the concept of ambivalence. For Landry, ambivalence encompasses the multitude of emotions—love and hate—experienced simultaneously by mothers, emotions that exist only in lived reality and not in the sanitised projection of the institution. Drawing on Donath’s study on regretting motherhood as her starting point, Landry engages with the assertion that

treating the institutionalization of motherhood as an untouchable experience with regard to regret reveals a structure of emotion and thought and allows us to note that the participants’ accounts of motherhood as an unworthy experience are worthy of meaning-making (Donath 2015: 363).

It is Donath’s foundational text and the debates it ignited that Landry brings into dialogue with two nonfiction films: Merle Grimme and Felizitas Hoffman’s Regretting Motherhood (2017) and Maria Ruido’s Mater Amatisima: Imaginaries and Discourses on Maternity (2017). Central to Landry’s discussion in this chapter is the distinction between fiction and non-fiction in their willingness to engage with maternal regret, fiction tending to weaponise it in the creation of the vilified mother, while more recent non-fiction treats it as a space for genuine exploration. By comparing the differing receptions of Donath’s study in Germany and Spain, Landry also interrogates the cultural tendency to collapse regret into bad motherhood. What emerges is a nuanced reframing: regret in motherhood is not, Landry argues, a regret for one’s children, but a regret for the life and identity surrendered in the name of mothering.

If regret represents the slow erosion of identity, exhaustion is its physical and psychological manifestation. Landry’s chapter on exhaustion interrogates the way in which the labour of mothering—invisible, unending, repetitive and interruptive—accumulates into a state that goes far beyond tiredness, ultimately concluding that exhaustion is ‘much less valued as a real concern’ (Landry 2025: 66). Central to her argument is the concept of repetition: it is the relentlessness of mothering, its resistance to completion or pause, that becomes the source of depletion. Landry’s film selection foregrounds the role of time and interruption in the exhaustion of mothers, with her readings of Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014) and Jason Reitman’s Tully (2018) revealing ‘the horror of parenting itself’ (48). She situates the films within a dual theoretical framework, bringing together Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the time-image, developed in Cinema 2 and Simone de Beauvoir’s theory of immanence, arguing that together ‘the world of the woman complements Deleuze’s ontology of time as exhaustion’ (46). The films, she claims, ‘weigh heavily with exhaustion’ (60), exploring how ‘exhaustion… unravels into an apogee of violence… [or] it just steadily abrades the body… under the plinths of motherhood’ (66). In this way, Landry exposes exhaustion as the fundamental friction of motherhood, the condition that foregrounds the rage, shame, guilt, and disgust explored in the chapters that follow.

In ‘Rage,’ Landry builds on the exhaustion and erosion of identity explored in the preceding chapter, arguing that ‘rage unfurls as an inevitable effect of motherhood’ (72). Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s notion of the feminist snap and Barbara Creed’s theorisation of the monstrous mother, Landry returns to The Babadook alongside the 2022 horror series The Baby and Charlotte Stoudt’s Pieces of Her (2022) to explore how ‘maternal anger can manifest in different ways and for different reasons, but frequently it arises as a consequence of the albatross of motherhood: the labour, the exhaustion, the isolation, and the frustration’ (72). What emerges is a portrait of rage not as failure, but as the logical consequence of the relentless weight of mothering.

Where rage turns outward, shame turns inward. Landry opens her chapter with the stark assertion that ‘there is no middle ground in motherhood; a mother is either good or bad, and quite often these two judgements are inextricably linked’ (89), framing shame as the inevitable consequence of failing to meet an impossible standard. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception to frame the ‘alien gaze’ and Tomkins’s theorisation of shame as bound to ‘visibility, exposure, and self-consciousness’ (Landry 2025: 106), Landry investigates ‘the ways in which shame can perform on and with film’ (92) across four films, including Savanah Leaf’s Mama Earth (2023). Landry’s discussion focuses on the racialised dimensions of maternal shame, arguing that ‘black mothers become the site and spectacle of admiration and fascination as well as trauma, violence, and crisis’ (101), with shame accruing not from personal failing but ultimately from ‘discriminatory modus operandi’ (101). Landry goes further to explain that the good and bad mother binaries are ‘creations of the institution of motherhood and far from the real experience of mothers’ (107), leaving shame as a residual emotion, clinging to the lives of all women unable to obtain the complete perfection required of the good mother.

Guilt, Landry argues, is perhaps the most persistent and normalised of the six emotions, so embedded in the cultural experience of motherhood that it is often mistaken for conscience rather than condition. Anchoring her argument in Adrienne Rich’s evocation of ‘the guilt, the guilt, the guilt’ of maternal responsibility (1977: 288), Landry positions guilt as the creation of the institution of motherhood rather than any failure of the individual mother. Drawing also on de Beauvoir’s notion that there is no ethics without failure, Landry explores three films whose maternal figures ‘perceive their mothering as flawed,’ haunted by a sense of failure that ‘hangs over motherhood like a cumulonimbus’ (2025: 122). What develops is a portrait of guilt as cyclical and self-perpetuating: ‘the guilty mother is the mother who perceives herself as a bad mother—as a failure’ (118), and it is this perception that generates the negative emotions, not the reality. It is, Landry concludes, a grating and inescapable presence, structural rather than deserved.

Landry closes her study with disgust, returning the reader to the most fundamental and physical threshold of becoming a mother. Drawing on Winfried Menninghaus’ observation that ‘disgust wields the power to repel as well as attract’ (1999: 6) and Julia Kristeva’s theorisation of the abject as that which confronts us with ‘our earliest attempts to release the hold of maternal entity even before existing outside’ (Kristeva 2024 [1982]: 13), Landry frames the post-partum body as a site of cultural anxiety and personal rupture. Laurent Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism underpins Landry’s film analysis, illuminating the sadness produced by the juxtaposition of the woman and the mother. The last film in Landry’s analysis is Emily Atef’s Stranger in Me (2008), which perfectly encompasses the destruction and disgust of pregnancy and birth. ‘The post-natal body becomes an oozing site of excrement that must be brought under control’ (148), and yet ‘mothers are not supposed to feel disgust about their children or about motherhood’ (143)—the very prohibition that makes disgust so transgressive and so revealing. What Landry ultimately exposes is ‘a splitting of the self through the sickening with the self’ (150), a collapse of borders between subject and object that returns us, viscerally, to the irresolvable tension between woman and mother that runs through the entire book.

The Cinema of Crushing Motherhood is a timely and necessary intervention in the discourse surrounding motherhood, both on- and off-screen. Landry’s focus on the negative emotions of mothering does not diminish the potential for joy but rather insists that joy cannot be fully understood without acknowledging the struggle that surrounds it. The films she examines function as cautionary tales rooted in reality, told predominantly from female perspectives, and offered as a breath of fresh air against a cultural landscape saturated with idealised visions of what a mother should be. In showing what motherhood is, Landry quietly but powerfully expands our understanding of what it could be.