What happens when women go feral?
Nightbitch is a trippy, surrealist excavation of motherhood based on the 2022 novel by Rachel Yoder. At its center is an unnamed protagonist, Mother (Amy Adams), a former artist who traded her canvases and galleries for diaper bags and playgrounds. As she struggles with raising her son nearly alone due to Husband (Scoot McNairy) traveling constantly, she realizes she’s lost a vital part of herself and seeks a means to break out. That call of the wild triggers an extraordinary but terrifying transformation: she might be turning into a dog (and a leader of the pack, at that).
That pack includes three other women, her circle of friends played by Zoë Chao, Mary Holland, and Archana Rajan, alongside a pack of dogs who come in the night to lead Mother on a quest for self-realization. As a counterpoint, her human mentor, a librarian (Jessica Harper), becomes a guide, while memories of her own mother provide context for Mother’s awakening.
Although they are each well-made and interesting films, Nightbitch is more insightful about the multiplicity of motherhood than Omni Loop and We Live in Time. While the three approach similar subject matter, the difference comes from an inside view. The other two are written and directed by men; conversely, Nightbitch is helmed by a woman. That shows in how the male creatives express what motherhood means to them and how they prescribe an absolute surrender of everything a woman is.
However, with writer/director Marielle Heller (The Diary of a Teenage Girl, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood), there is an understanding that to become the best mother, a woman must be entirely herself. Women cannot teach children to live fully if they do not possess some understanding of what it is to be fulfilled.
That’s where Nightbitch becomes a tasty morsel to chew on. It doesn’t preach that a mother must be anything other than balanced—both a woman who is nurturing and a self who is living. That’s what drew me in and kept me. A woman goes feral to save her sanity; breaking the skin of a marriage of captivity and the weight of parenting to the brink of exhaustion. She reshapes herself, leading the women around her to see themselves as something more than “mom” and only that. One of my favorite scenes finds the four friends drinking wine and confessing how ferocious they are.
The premise of Nightbitch is unusual for sure, but it is a poetic metaphor. Mother is so starved for freedom that she becomes canine. In transforming into an animal, she finds her place, running with other dogs who have broken out and chosen the wild. Yet, through her walk on the wild side—fur on her skin, the blood of a fresh kill between her teeth—she discovers what it is to be human, woman, mother, free.
NIGHTBITCH releases in theaters December 6th
