Nightbitch is a searing, painful portrait of motherhood – where the titular character just happens to lose herself so dramatically in parenthood that she winds up turning into a dog. It was a hit book in 2021 and has been adapted for the screen by Marielle Heller, with Amy Adams in the lead role. So, does the film live up to the gritty, surrealness of the book? And what does it really have to say about the experience of trying to hold onto your own individual personhood while being consumed by motherhood and societal expectations? (And could this finally be Amy Adam’s Oscar moment?!) Here’s our Take!
This is a raw, realistic depiction of motherhood
We’ve never seen motherhood portrayed onscreen in quite the way that Nightbitch presents it. While there have been more honest interpretations making their way into the mainstream recently, a lot of these focus on mothers who struggle to bond with their children, or find the weight of maternal expectation crushing. The difference with Nightbitch is that it actually shows a far more average setup, for the most part. The lead character – mother by day, Nightbitch when her son is sleeping – doesn’t shy away from the joy and beauty of motherhood. But it’s also open about a real taboo: she finds her life as a stay at home mom incredibly difficult. Although she clearly adores him, she doesn’t want her entire life to revolve around her toddler. She finds the day-to-day of parenthood grueling and monotonous. She misses her career as an artist. Yet she shows up, every day, and plays with him, engages with him, makes sure he has a great time – and it doesn’t feel like she’s masking or faking in these moments, because he really does light up her world. It’s more when she’s doing the repetitive tasks – making breakfast, trying to get a wired kid to sleep – that she struggles to find joy. And the movie puts forward a really important idea: that maybe, just maybe, every second of parenthood isn’t a joy. In this way, it’s an accurate depiction of the duality of the experience. Nightbitch’s feelings about what motherhood has meant for her don’t change how she feels about him . As Katrina Onstad wrote in the New York Times, the movie shows that ‘It’s possible to be a good mom and monstrous, too’. Director Marielle Heller says, “I wanted to say about motherhood - as someone who is a mother - is that you can have complicated feelings about it, and it doesn’t mean you don’t want to be a parent.”
This complexity is rich fodder for Heller and Adams, who often explore the stark dichotomy of parenthood in a single scene. For example, in one scene, Nightbitch encourages her son to make a mess, laying out a huge sheet of paper and assorted paints on the kitchen floor. But while it starts well, he quickly starts pushing the boundaries, smearing paint on the walls, and then running out of the room – and when Nightbitch goes to follow him, she slips in paint and cracks her back on the floor. This scene exemplifies how parenthood defies planning sometimes – how you can go into moments with your kids with the best of intentions, and come out humbled. And it’s something that Adams identifies with, too “There was just so much in it that I identified with, not only about motherhood, but about marriage, and how that shifts in parenthood… it does change you so much… I think that sort of investment in another life, the focus, the time, the energy, the love you feel really does change you.”
In its tragic exploration of Nightbitch’s own mother’s story – as a gifted singer, who once believed she might make it in Europe, before she married within her Mennonite community and had children – the film also explores how these patterns are not exclusive to our current generation of mothers. The sacrifice expected from women when they become parents isn’t new – but Nightbitch puts forward the idea that we can be cyclebreakers.
The filmmakers want us to like Nightbitch’s husband. We’re not convinced.
In Rachel Yoder’s book, Nightbitch’s husband is aloof and rarely present, as work draws him away from home so often. But when he is there, he’s more responsive to Nightbitch than the character in the movie. In the film, he’s a little pluckier, angrier, and perhaps more pathetic. When Heller was interviewed about the character, she said “The husband is not an asshole, he’s not intending to not get what’s happening to her but there’s so little time to even discuss what’s happening in your brain when you’re parenting that he’s clueless to what she’s experiencing and going through…” But still, the comparison between the two different Father characters is striking.
In early interviews and reviews, the film was termed ‘a comedy for women and a horror for men’. A lot was made of the ‘body horror’ aspect of the movie – the gruesome moment when Nightbitch pops a cyst on her back and draws out a stringy tail from it – and the fact that the filmmakers chose to show her menstrual blood in the shower. But some of the most horrifying parts of the movie are actually Father’s tone-deaf platitudes and total ambivalence towards his wife’s needs. Although Heller is quick to reassure that her rewrite of Father isn’t a villain, there are points – when he fails to be proactive with his son when he is around, when he doesn’t support her wish to return back to work, when he dares to ask his wife where the woman he married went – where we see that the lived reality of so many women who have kids with average, non-villainous men is pretty bleak, actually.
What about the other moms?
At first, Nightbitch hates taking her son to organised events for kids – she visibly recoils when she realises she’s arrived at the library just as the Book Babies club is starting. She resents the other mothers who all appear blissful and put-together, kind of like the real-life social media mommies who present an outwardly idyllic idea of motherhood on Instagram, and she says. But as the movie progresses, Mother turns into Nightbitch, and realises that all the other moms are dogs, as well – and not just the moms at the baby groups, but her own mother, too. One of the key ideas this movie opens up is that, actually, whether we like it or not, motherhood is a bond. And other mothers can be the people who will understand you the best – not your old college friends, not your husband, but the women you meet in the trenches of parenting, who maybe don’t share your history, but can completely relate to your present.
How is this film different from the 2021 book?
This film is quite different from the novel – perhaps in part because it’s difficult to translate the book’s specific style of magical realism onscreen. Although there are definitely some disturbing visuals in the movie, for the most part it’s not as graphic. In the book, there are some fairly intense scenes – where the lead character kills the family cat in her human form, in front of her toddler. In the movie, the death of the cat happens, but offscreen, and it’s implied that she kills it in her dog form.
Director Marielle Heller wrote the script and used her own experiences to add to the novel’s plot, so there are more significant changes, too. For example, the husband character is a little more useless in the movie. This is framed as both of the characters’ fault; with Heller and Adams both mentioning that there’s been a breakdown in communication, resulting in Nightbitch taking on the lion’s share of the caregiving. But in the book, when Nightbitch begins to demand he do more with their son, the Father character sits up and takes notice. Perhaps as a result of that, in the book, the pair don’t actually split up; their relationship becomes stronger as a result of her boundary-setting, and their sexual relationship becomes richer because he embraces her dog-side. They don’t have a second child in the end of the book, either. This really changed the way the story ended; in the novel, we get this sense that Mother has returned to making art as though it’s a primal need, which she must approach with the same ferocity and energy as she does parenting. The movie, however, ends with Mother having a home birth, and being told by her doula that she’s going to meet her daughter – which, although poetic in its symmetry of Nightbitch giving birth to a potential future Nightbitch, did seem to soften the message at the core of the story.
Will this be Amy Adams’ Oscar win?
Will this be Amy Adam’s big Oscar moment? We hope so! Adams uses every string in the bow of her phenomenal acting talent in this movie – at once vulnerable and vicious, sweet and sexy, maternal and manic. We can see her capabilities as she plays the same scene twice, back to back – delivering an anxious, desperate monologue about parenthood to a former colleague in the supermarket, which turns out to be imagined when we then see her respond with a wide smile and nod of assent. Though some of the brutality of the book was lost in the film, Adams becomes genuinely feral-seeming as Nightbitch imagines attacking her husband when he interrupts her alone time. And she fully leans into the moments where the character becomes more dog-like, eating ravenously off plates with her face, running on all fours through the park.
And notably, she was unafraid to become Nightbitch physically, too, even growing out her chin hairs for a scene where she finds herself becoming ‘fuzzy’, as her son calls it. Another potential indicator is that Adams was awarded the Toronto International Film Festival’s TIFF Tribute Performer Award back in June – an accolade that’s been linked to eventual Oscar winners. But though this created a buzz at the time, film critics claim Nightbitch won’t be Adams’ well-deserved Oscar win, citing the movie as being too difficult a sell for the Academy Awards…
Adams herself told IndieWire that winning an Oscar, “is not something I think about when I approach a role.” And it does seem like she has other motives for taking the role – it genuinely feels like this is a character that Adams connects with on a deep level. She, like so many members of the audience, is Nightbitch – has experienced the soaring highs and crashing lows of motherhood, recognises the constant struggle to be a good enough parent. She’s mentioned in a lot of the press around the movie that people keep sharing their postpartum stories with her – and this seems to genuinely touch her. Whether she wins awards for the performance or not, she’s the perfect embodiment of a character so many people have loved since she first wagged her tail on the page.
Conclusion
When the Nightbitch trailer first dropped, fans of the book worried that the movie wouldn’t live up to their expectations. But as Meredith Blake wrote in the LA Times, ‘The trailer… made “Nightbitch” seem like a wacky mom-com version of “Teen Wolf” rather than what it is: a surreal, insightful film about the joys and anguish of motherhood, and the sometimes disturbing ways that becoming a parent can transform women’s minds, bodies, emotional lives and entire sense of self. Although the movie doesn’t quite hit the dizzyingly surreal levels that the book does, it’s still beautiful – at times heartbreaking, at others hilarious, and always one of the rawest interpretations of motherhood we’ve ever seen onscreen.