2025 Reviews – Nightbitch

Nightbitch 😳 Assumedly, a bitch of the night… What will they think of next?

Stay-at-home Mum, inanely named Mother (Amy Adams), is really struggling with all that comes with that. She starts to notice unusual hair showing up in weird places all over her body, and has vivid dreams of running at night with dogs, that coincide with events in the morning. But more than this, and back in the realm of reality, Mother contemplates what it’ll take for her to be able to juggle motherhood and the life she once knew. Marielle Heller adapts and directs.

Oh boy, I’ll tell you right away, I found this premise pretty dumb. There’s an episode of Round the Twist, Season 3(!), where Bronson is transformed into the Nirandathal Beast, that has more sense and sensibility than this 😑 However Nightbitch does track a noble pursuit in pairing Mother’s sudden transformation with the sense that, as a human woman, Mother is still an instinctual animal, and that can soon be forgotten when motherhood instills a tiresome routine, catering solely for someone else. But from the very beginning, and all the way through, I quibble with Nightbitch’s bad-faith take on the trials and tribulations of motherhood, and I’m irreceptive. The whole idea of “giving up your dreams for the sake of the species” – I don’t buy that. And, by the end, all Mother needed to begin to restore feeling like herself, was to rest, to paint, and exercise. Yeah, no fucking shit.

But I’m on the outside looking in. I’ve never had a kid. Haven’t known the unimaginable strains that prop up atop of the imaginable ones. However I don’t appreciate the limited parameters with which we are presented and expected to form an emotional attachment to these people. One such example is the assumption that Husband (Scoot McNairy) has it easy because he gets to leave the house and go to work, while Mother must stay at home and look after their son. And my response to that is, maybe. I don’t think we even find out what Husband does for a living, or if he loves his job. Maybe he is merely working to put food on the table for the family? Maybe he has to contend with soul-sucking traffic, or overstuffed public transport – loons on the roads, loons in the carriages? Office politics, extreme heat, rain, body strain, unrealistic pressures or expectations? The worker could argue the joys that the stay-home parent gets, in shaping their future son – surely a much more significantly stimulating and rewarding role than any raggedy office job 🤷‍♀️ We certainly don’t get a scene depicting how Mother and Husband agreed to have a child in the first place, and it’s vital context. Is the tension they’re facing now a result of Son (Arleigh Snowden/Emmett Snowden) being an unexpected accident, while Mother and Husband are trying to make the best of it? Or did both sides agree to start trying for a family wholeheartedly, but only now just realise they have different ideas on what the task would take? It’s fine for them to have made a plan – that Mother would stay home and forego her art – and for that plan to come unstuck; but are they both shocked into submission by the other ones attitude, or were they always poor at communicating? When Husband asks in outrage, “what happened to the girl I married?”, and Mother retorts, “she died in childbirth”, is that meant to be a zinger for the audience to clap as Mother is reclaiming her power? Or another sign of their shocking relationship, since they clearly don’t talk about their emotions, or hear each other out? I’m taken aback to believe this movie thinks that men need to here this, and maybe they do. But maybe women need to pick men that are willingly going to share the strain, and speak up from the beginning of the partnership 🤨 Husband is struggling as a parent now because he hasn’t been active sooner – dumb. And in no way do I say any of this to be mean, only that if you’re in this exact scenario, of course you’re going to have concerns – it’d be weird to expect you wouldn’t. The worst part of this movie is that I agree with it too – motherhood is fucking brutal; I hear ya! I just hate how the movie goes about it.

Nightbitch did provide initiative for me to have an hour long conversation with my experienced sister on the nature of parenting, and that was stimulating. My basic point to come out of it is that it’s all case by case, with varying levels of difficulty for both parents, and she agreed with that. I explained this movie’s bath scene to her, which ends with Mother angrily stating that she is usually capable of preparing everything herself while Husband keeps expecting assistance, and my sister found that totally relatable. But then I added that it’s a bit disingenuous for a women to claim that “babies don’t come with a manual. You learn as you go”, and then scold a man when he doesn’t know the proper way to organise himself out of the gate – and she took that point. Ultimately, my beef with this movie is that it has no interest in both-sidesing it. And I think that’s where true knowledge and reflection comes from. I’m reminded of Marriage Story, about a divorce that unravels all good feelings between a pair – but I never came away from that movie siding with one particular parent or the other, because the movie endeavored to always present why a certain character was acting or feeling a certain way. And through doing so, I feel like I had more empathy, and a wider understanding of events that were occurring. Dare I say, Nightbitch is more in the Women Talking category of activism movies, where it’s complaining more than anything; “don’t question the circumstance, or search for context – just revel in how horrible this very specific scenario may be” 🙃

Amy Adams is admirable, predominantly acting across an erratic kid, and making it seem natural. She has seemingly gained weight for the role, as is her professional dedication, but I still don’t see much merit in the character. I just found Nightbitch the sum of nothing – you can do and say anything fancy you want, but times it by zero, and you still get nothing. But I’ll concede that maybe some mothers out there will get some basic ideas out of it, to be able to better define their emotions, or articulate their concerns relating to the weight of motherhood. Actually, if some mothers feel better in any way after watching Nightbitch, then I’m happy for them. Marielle Heller has directed three other movies before this that I would completely recommend – The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Can You Ever Forgive Me? and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood – but, from Nightbitch, I’ll jog on. Nightbitch is not for me. Onwards and upward.

1.5

P.S. Also, a technical mansplaination, but there’s a couple times when Mother goes off-tap, for the movie to reverse time, and replay the scenario like nothing happened. But the movie should just carry on, so we don’t know what is real, while we can only assume what Mother has been saying, or what she has done, is only to herself alone.