The Mental Load Doesn’t Win Oscars (But It Should)
Somewhere between the BAFTAs and the Oscars, I’ve been struck by how rare, and necessary, it feels to see women’s interior lives taken seriously on screen. Hamnet (directed by Chloé Zhao, the film adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s story), with Jessie Buckley, is exquisite, embodied grief told from a wife’s perspective. It honours the complexity of love and loss, two loving parents, grieving differently. In the film, Shakespeare’s work becomes part of a wider national mourning: art in service of a country reeling from plague, and a lifeline for anyone living inside unbearable loss. And quietly threaded through it is something older: the reality that a father’s ability to step in and out of domestic life in service of work or ‘greater purpose’ has historically been permitted, even expected. Not always, many men carry family life beautifully, but culturally, the freedom to prioritise beyond the home has rarely been afforded to women. These stories don’t attack that truth; they illuminate it.
Yet it is Rose Byrne in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (written and directed by Mary Bronstein), who, for me, deserves the Oscar. Her performance captures the particular madness of modern motherhood: loving your child fiercely while absorbing the mental load, while negotiating the part-time presence of a well-meaning partner, while trying to keep functioning. And her character’s own therapist is so breathtakingly misattuned that you find yourself shifting in your seat, a useful reminder that therapy is less about having a therapist and more about having the right one. There is no golden halo at the end. No sudden epiphany that makes it all feel equal. Just something more honest. And honesty, in film, as in therapy, is where the real work begins.