Finally, a movie that shows motherhood for what it really is.

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The Oscar buzz surrounding Rose Byrne's new film If I Had Legs I'd Kick You is only getting louder, with the anxiety-inducing, genre-bending flick described as a "dark comedic psychological drama."

The film, about a mother whose child has an unnamed chronic condition that includes a refusal to eat, is, at times, a hard watch.

Byrne is brilliant as the harangued, existentially exhausted Linda, whose absent husband only offers dismissive criticism over the phone, while she tries to balance her own work as a therapist with the constant demands of her (mostly off-screen but ever-present) daughter.

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The shots are tight. The camera is, for want of a more technical cinematic descriptor, all up in her face. It's unrelenting — just like the reality of the condition it depicts.

The film is part of a wider recent trend that puts modern motherhood — in all its unsexy, exhausted self-doubt — under a microscope.

The film adaptation of Rachel Yoder's critically-acclaimed novel Nightbitch — which follows an overwhelmed, former artist and stay-at-home mother who becomes convinced she is literally transforming into a dog — was released in December 2024.

Jessamine Chan's The School For Good Mothers is a dystopian novel released in 2022 and set in a post-apocalyptic future in which a government-run facility judges and re-educates 'bad mothers'.

While The Push by Ashley Audrain explores generational trauma and the difficulties of maternal bonding in a psychological suspense novel about a woman who is convinced something is wrong with her daughter.

The existential dread of motherhood is having a(nother) moment.

Of course, it's not the first time commentary on the darker side of this phase of life has entered the zeitgeist.

The early noughties and the birth of 'mummy-blogging' brought about the popularity of the 'hot mess' mum-trope — and at the time, it felt revolutionary to be able to whisper and then shout about the overwhelm, the mundanity and the loss of self it can bring with it.

The pendulum, as pendulums are supposed to do, then swung hard back in the opposite direction.

An explosion of sponsorship deals and curated 'brand identities' drove the emergence of creators such as Nara Smith and Ariele Charnas, whose aspirational fever-dream content suggests that children only ever enhance and adorn the intrinsic value of a mother's life.

But, now, as the world becomes ever darker, so too does our portrayal of the exquisite discomfort of mothering in the new millennium.

Of course, as with all criticism of modern parenting, it can be hard to find the nuance.

It's a challenge to insert the moments of blinding, knee-buckling love that intermingle with the drudgery of obligation and keep us upright.

Yes, the slow seepage of self from a woman's body when she is stuck in the difficult years of early motherhood, or the more-difficult and unending years of mothering a child with additional needs, is the stuff of psychological thriller films, but only those of us living inside it can also see the beautiful, absurd transcendence of it all alongside it.

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In If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, the push-pull of frantic, high-stakes panic with boring, labour-intensive repetition creates the type of tension that only an actress like Byrne — whose comedy chops are well-established, but who shines in this opportunity, can pull off.

It's the kind of highly-specific, yet universally relatable portrayal that immediately grants mothers in the audience access to a subtly-coded club.

Yes, we think, as we watch in a prickly sweat.

Yes, I recognise this. I recognise me.

Which is, when you think about it, the only balm to the onslaught.

We might all be wading our way through individual versions of the same matrescence quicksand, but if we can look up from the trudge from time to time and lock eyes with another warrior, sharing a look of recognition and connection, then we might just be able to keep going.

Feature image: A24.