Never mind Lars von Trier torturing women and ducklings. Some of the most shocking scenes I have seen on screen this year arrive next month in a low-budget British relationship drama set in a suburban semi in Kent. The film is The Escape, starring Gemma Arterton as a 30-year-old stay-at-home mother, Tara, who abandons her family in a fug of depression and dissatisfaction. I almost couldn’t watch one excruciating scene, in which Tara, eyes glazed, voice flat and distant, tells her husband (Dominic Cooper) how she feels about their kids: “I don’t care about them. I don’t care if they finish their dinner. I don’t care if they go to school or don’t go to school. I don’t care, but I make myself care. I make myself be funny and happy. I think they hate me.” Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again it ain’t. In fact, The Escape is a candidate for feel-bad film of the year, possibly the decade.

I mean that in the nicest possible way. Spending 101 emotionally draining minutes watching a marriage disintegrate with documentary precision isn’t everyone’s idea of a fun night out. But The Escape is superbly acted and unsqueamishly tackles an unspoken taboo: women who regret having children. The film industry is jumping on the bandwagon of “strong female characters”. But at the expense of how many other stories? Because, while Charlize Theron badassing her way through action movies in six-inch heels is inspiring, it doesn’t say much about the daily reality of most women’s lives.

In a study published in May, 81% of women said they had felt overwhelmed or unable to cope at some point over the past year (compared with 67% of men). But, while there are plenty of mums from hell in the movies – characters whose main function is to royally eff up the emotional lives of their kids – fewer films are interested in the reality of life for the 81% – in particular, the exhaustion, frustration, self-doubt and boredom that can accompany motherhood.

What surprised me about The Escape is that it is written and directed by a man, Dominic Savage (although the dialogue is improvised). Savage wrote the film for Arterton, shooting it in her home town; one scene was even filmed in her mum’s garden. Talking to him on the phone, I find out the story is partly autobiographical. When Savage was a child, his mother announced that she was walking out when she picked him up from school one afternoon. “She told me she wanted to go; that she was going to go,” he says, thoughtfully. “But at that time, women had very limited options. She didn’t go. Maybe she should have. She was very unfulfilled for the rest of her life.” In the film, he frames Tara in front of windows as if she needs oxygen – as if family life is suffocating her.

Tara’s unhappiness is in part down to her circumstances; she had kids young and now feels as if she is living the wrong life. She wonders if could do something in art; she was good at drawing at school. I do the maths: Tara would have been 24 or 25 when she gave birth to her first child. At that age, I had just landed my dream job in publishing. Fifteen years on, when my daughter arrived, much later than expected and much longed for, motherhood really was all fulfilment, joy and love. But I sympathise with Tara. Anyone who has been in the trenches for 14 hours with a toddler will recognise her thousand-yard stare.

Perhaps the mother of all dramas in the canon of films that do explore family life for women in turmoil is A Woman Under the Influence, the 1974 film by John Cassavetes starring his wife, Gena Rowlands, as Mabel. A stay-at-home mother bringing up three children in a one-bedroom flat with no room to breathe, Mabel drinks too much, is always saying the wrong thing and trying too hard to please. She loves her kids and her husband, but he is off working all hours. Mabel is briefly sent to a psychiatric unit, but you suspect that she is not mad, simply a woman who has been ignored; whose spirit has been crushed. In an interview with the Guardian, Rowlands joked about how hard the film was to get financed: “Why does anyone want to see a picture about a crazy middle-aged dame?” It’s one of those films I watch more or less once a year.

One of the Oscars’ greatest crimes was giving the best actress award to Nicole Kidman for wearing a beaky prosthetic nose as Virginia Woolf in The Hours, while her co-star Julianne Moore went home empty-handed for her role as Laura, who, like Mabel, is a square-peg housewife. At the start of the movie, set in the late 1940s, we see Laura attempting an impersonation of a happy housewife, baking a cake for her husband’s birthday with disastrous results. In an inexpressibly sad scene, we get a glimpse of her authentic self, as she kisses a female neighbour on the lips. The Hours cranks up compassion for Laura, even as we watch her son howling with despair as she walks out.

When Meryl Streep made Kramer vs. Kramer, playing a woman who leaves her husband and seven-year-old son in search of fulfilment, she asked for rewrites to make the character less of a villain. When researching the role, her first port of call was her mother, who told Streep: “All my friends, at one point or another, wanted to throw up their hands and leave, and see if there was another way of doing their lives.”

Recently, we have seen more films that bring a healthy dose of reality to the myths of motherhood, portraying the loneliness and exhaustion of work combined with kids and the emotional labour of having a family (all the other stuff women do. Because, while most men change nappies, few of them notice when stocks are running low, let alone which size to buy). In Tully, for example, Charlize Theron is the mother of three mourning the loss of her old life.

Horror films hath committed innumerable crimes against feminism. But two recent scary movies directed by women are exceptions, breaking more motherhood taboos. Jennifer Kent’s terrifying The Babadook portrays a mother who dislikes – possibly even hates – her son. She is Amelia (Essie Davis), a single mum whose husband was killed in a car crash while taking her to hospital to give birth. Now, she is drowning in the business of raising their difficult seven-year-old son. In an interview, Kent had this to say about the fantasies of having it all: “We’re all, as women, educated and conditioned to think that motherhood is an easy thing that just happens … But it can also be the other stuff because you don’t have any time for your own life any more and you have to give up everything for this child. It’s also a great difficulty for a lot of women and it’s not spoken about.”

In her deliciously warped black comedy Prevenge, the British actor and director Alice Lowe exorcised her own fears about pregnancy and motherhood (she was eight months’ pregnant during the shoot). Lowe plays a woman who believes her unborn baby is telling her to commit mass murder. (A bit disconcertingly, the baby has a voice like Moaning Myrtle in the Harry Potter films.)

In an odd way, The Escape is more terrifying than either Prevenge or The Babadook. There’s nothing abstract or metaphorical about its portrait of motherhood, the mental, emotional and physical cost of having kids. I ask Savage if he has had any negative feedback. He laughs wryly. “I get the feeling that men are less enthralled with it in general. It’s not a film for misogynists. I think that really would be a horror story for a lot of men … to be left literally holding the baby [and] the idea of a woman finding herself by leaving.”

The Escape is released on 3 August