Postpartum, Possessed, or Just Trapped?

“Throughout patriarchal mythology, dream-symbolism, theology, language, two ideas flow side by side: one, that the female body is impure, corrupt, the site of discharges, bleedings, dangerous to masculinity, a source of moral and physical contamination, 'the devil’s gateway'. On the other hand, as mother the woman is beneficent, sacred, pure, asexual, nourishing: and the physical body with its bleedings and mysteries–is her single destiny and justification in life. These two ideas have become deeply internalized in women, even in the most independent of us, those who seem to lead the freest lives.”

– Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976)

Award-winning poet and feminist, Adrienne Rich, in her awe-inspiring work, Of Woman Born:

Motherhood as Experience and Institution, lays the perfect foreground for the discussion of cinema’s recent grappling with motherhood, particularly in the horror genre. Rich’s book details her personal journey with motherhood and the institution itself. In one passage, she mentions how she was “haunted” by “the visual and literary images of motherhood as a single-minded identity” and “if I knew parts of myself existed that would never cohere to those images, weren’t those arts then abnormal, monstrous?” From Die My Love (2025), MOM (2025), to Bring Her Back (2025), horror is once again (did the train ever truly depart?) adding to its rolodex of psychologically disturbed mothers. While horror has become a significant space for exploring maternal despair, its representations appear caught in a damning loop: motherhood is rendered legible only through monstrosity and mental collapse.

Many genres have featured a litany of mentally ill or ‘mad’ female characters. Like the 90s coming-of-age drama, Girl Interrupted (1999), or the surreal odyssey Poor Things (2022). Arguably, this is made even more layered in the exploration of gendered madness through the lens of motherhood, and horror does this often. The acclaimed modern horror film, The Babadook (2014), is a prime example of this at play.

Writer, Gretchen Bisplinghoff, in Jump Cut’s 1992 issue, points out: “films dealing with mentally ill women repeatedly focus on the illness’ relation to female sexuality. In particular, the illness relates to the process of motherhood”. Through her study of the ‘madwoman’ archetype in Hollywood films from the 1940s to 1980s, she claims the psychoanalytic precepts of Sigmund Freud widely seeped into popular culture. Bisplinghoff purports in Freudian, patriarchal ideology that the mother “sacrifices herself, her individuality, to nurture others”. In addition, based on Freud’s ideology, “the ‘normal’ functioning of a woman's brain depends upon the condition of the uterus. Any bodily change of a sexual nature, such as pregnancy, destabilizes the mind. The normal female bodily cycle is seen as dysfunctional.”

Gynaehorror, a term coined by New Zealand Scholar Erin Harrington, is defined as “horror that deals with all aspects of female reproductive horror”. Whether that’s virginity, pregnancy, birth, motherhood, menopause or post-menopause and more. It’s not a mode restricted to horror as a film genre; it can be applied more widely to connect visual representation and aesthetic expression to broader sociocultural and philosophical issues. However, Harrington does arguethat horror films are the stage “in which [gynaehorror] makes itself most visible, most fecund, even”.

Released this past year, writer-director Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love (2025) takes you on an absurdly wild ride. The filmis an adaptation of Ariana Harwicz’s debut novel Die, My Love, published in 2012. Grace (Jennifer Lawrence), a writer from New York, while pregnant, moves with her husband, Jackson (Robert Pattinson), to a new home back in his rural hometown. She later gives birth to her son Harry, and the film follows Grace’s sanity spiral out of control as she struggles with her new life. She’s frustrated with her artistic practice or lack thereof, her marriage, social life and motherhood. Writer Jessica Kiang notes, “Grace’s disintegration is frequently described in terms of her needling, burdensome sexuality”. For instance, we see her crawl through the grass where she and Jackson used to make love. She masturbates almost neurotically and spends time fantasizing about a motorcyclist (LaKeith Stanfield). The film isn’t short of visceral moments. In one scene, after bashing her head against a mirror, Grace is checked into a mental-health facility. A therapist diagnoses her with a fear of abandonment on account of her being orphaned as a child. Yet an official mental diagnosis, such as postpartum depression, is never made clear.

Author and film critic, Alise Chaffins remarks: “unfortunately, Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love is so broad in the way that it can be interpreted, it can read more as a ‘bitches be crazy’ film than a deep look at the mental health struggles of a woman with PPD.” Similarly, Richard Brody from The New Yorker says: “As an exploration of the postpartum dangers to a woman’s mental health, 'Die My Love' does the subject a disservice—it leaves out the medical specifics and the forms and prospects of treatment. The movie both sensationalizes those dangers and subordinates them to a general, social-existential vision of women’s frustrations and subjugations in marriage."

A few days after the movie was featured at Cannes, Ramsay, during a fireside chat with prominent film journalist and critic Elvis Mitchell, remarked, “This whole postpartum thing is just bullshit”. She adds: “It’s not about that. It’s about a relationship breaking down, it’s about love breaking down, and sex breaking down after having a baby. And it’s also about a creative block”. While Harwicz herself has not stated that Grace suffers from postpartum depression, Ramsay’s stance nonetheless reveals how the film ultimately loses a crucial through-line of the novel.

In distancing itself from any specific psychiatric framing, Die My Love flattens motherhood’s role in Grace’s psychological decline, allowing her distress to be read as pathological, or even gratuitous, rather than structurally tied to maternal confinement. In a 2018 interview with neverimitate, Harwicz describes the book as “the story of a woman faced with two possible fates: being a mother/wife/lover or walking the riskier, marshy path of simply Being.”

She also says she was inspired to write the book as means of escape from “motherhood as a form of prison, a trap, an ordinary destiny”. Additionally, Adam O'Brien's indie horror film MOM (2025) doesn’t feel substantially distinctive and treads similar waters to those we’ve seen before. A mother grappling with postpartum depression and a challenging marriage. Whereas Bring Her Back (2025), Australian twin Directors Dany and Michael Philippou’s recent addition to the disturbed mothers'; universe, provides a sharper, macabre tale of motherhood. Old occult VHS tapes. A strange, barren backyard swimming pool. A child eating knives. The Observer described it as “the most unsettling film of the year”. The film chronicles Laura (Sally Hawkins), a bereaved mother who fosters two children following the death of their father. What follows is a dark tale of the intensities of both a mother’s love and grief.

While the horror genre has taken bold leaps in its attempts to portray the complexities of motherhood, it often feels constrained. Commodified and packaged without deeper introspection. An overwhelming majority feature white mothers, mostly middle-class. It appears that when it comes to maternal despair, the genre is only concerned with one singular identity. Ultimately, as Harrington points out: “This monstrous-maternal is a troublesome double bind that frames the woman as always-already monstrous, and one that, perhaps, hides behind yet transcends more historically specific accounts of ideologically complicit or transgressive forms of motherhood”.

Will 2026 bring anything new to the rolodex?