Yet those are by no means the only stories being told about motherhood right now. It’s difficult to think of a more affecting example than Alice Diop’s Saint Omer (2022), revolving around a pregnant novelist who attends the trial of a Senegalese woman accused of murdering her baby. There are no easy solutions in Saint Omer, no prepackaged theses or tidy narratives about how having kids will make you crazy; it’s just one woman, on the uncertain brink of motherhood, recognizing glimpses of herself in the tragic story of another. “In Saint Omer, silence is key,” Jennifer Padjemi wrote of the film in a 2024 Criterion Collection essay. “It communicates fear, anger, empathy, loneliness, and sadness, but also the intergenerational trauma of women who have never been allowed to express their feelings.”
Also unlike Tully’s Marlo or Nightbitch’s Mother, in A.V. Rockwell’s feature directorial debut A Thousand and One, the threat that Teyana Taylor’s single-mom protagonist Inez faces to her motherhood (and, consequently, her sanity) comes from without, not within. At the film’s outset, Inez kidnaps her young son Terry from foster care shortly after her release from prison, and A Thousand and One chronicles her attempt to parent despite the scourges of abuse, police brutality and systemic racism. With no safety net to speak of, hallucinating nannies or running the streets in “dog mode,” aren’t even a consideration.
Taylor as Inez and Aaron Kingsley Adetola in A Thousand and One, 2023.
Photo: Courtesy of Focus Features
