Why You Shouldn’t Laugh if Your Wife Calls Herself a ‘Nightbitch’

The other day I watched Cuckoo, a film about parenting and the supernatural. To pair with that viewing, I figured Nightbitch would be a good selection. Nightbitch is a heavily metaphorical film about the challenges of motherhood. While Cuckoo had a very surface-level metaphor running, Nightbitch excelled in its subtlety and inventiveness. In its bravery to do the weird. Nightbitch committed to 8 nipples and a tail. Cuckoo was too scared to take off the trenchcoat.

Adapting and Adopting

An unfair advantage that Nightbitch has is that it’s based on a book, and according to the book readers, the film was a letdown. We can delve into the struggles of adapting books to movies later, but the point is that a dense, lengthy, novel that’s adapted into a movie gets two rounds of editing and treatment. Ideally, like in NB (because I feel uncomfortable saying the b-word so much because I am feminist of course), the additional scrutiny led to a very thoughtful film.

The film’s focus is a real-life, grounded story about a new mother struggling with raising a toddler mostly on her own, while her husband, who travels for work, remains blind to her struggles and minimizes the effort and transition from being an individual to being a mother. The film melds this realism with a healthy, nearly confusing amount of fantasy. The film makes it a habit to unceremoniously transition to daydreams and fantasia, and then back again. The dreamlike flow leaves the viewer confused and dazed, intending to impart upon us the state that the mother must be in, starting with the very first scene in the (depending on your level of feminism) unsettling opening monologue.

Through the mother’s fugue states comes the slow transition and acceptance that she is becoming, or truly is, partly a dog. An animal. A powerful creature. The canine visions cross over into her life intermittently, and propel the metaphor and the mother’s journey to acceptance and self-actualization.

Good Dog, Smart Dog, Bad Dog

The reason I liked NB’s metaphor function is because it wasn’t a 1 to 1 analogy. It didn’t immediately reveal itself, and the film never found it necessary to explain the non-realism to the audience. Instead, the metaphor grows and builds, sometimes in a grotesque way, sometimes in a frightening way, sometimes in a puzzling way. There were plenty of scenes and shots and visuals that may or may not have played into the metaphor, and the film made us work to fit those pieces together, sometimes in our own way (depending on how feminist you are)!

In a sense, NB was meant for men to realize just how stupid they can be, but also for women to feel validated in their struggles. Beyond the canine transformation metaphor, a lot of the film was quite on-the-nose, strung along by cliches and poor communication.

The film NB is not perfect, but it was surprisingly captivating. Some of the dialogues and events were cliche. Only the most oblivious, useless, selfish, father would call it ‘babysitting’. Only an utter oafish, moronic, insensitive husband would accept his wife abandoning her dreams and ambitions without questioning the decision. Only a dumb, idiot, stupid, doo-doo brain would chuckle if his wife called herself a night bitch.

The Tail End of Things

And also, NB has a very weird ending: 

The film spends its runtime hammering into the audience just how taxing and grating it was for the mother to raise the child mostly alone, and how, without support, she was losing her grip on herself and had already lost her connection to her creativity. In the end, she leaves her husband, forcing him into childcare at least half the time, which is enough time for her to explode with creativity in a way that dazzles and amazes her old pretentious friends, and her new mom friends. The husband then acknowledges how hard parenting is, and that he failed to realize that his wife had succumbed to abandoning her ambitions. 

So. What’s the logical next step for the newly self-actualized mother? Which of the below options leads to a more thematic and satisfying ending to this story? Should she:

1. Continue to live this amazing life where she can return to her ambitions and also love her time with her child?
2. Get back with her ex husband and have another baby?

Seriously. Think those choices through before you watch the movie or look into the book ending.

All of that said, I enjoyed Nightbitch greatly. It was bold and creative and heartfelt and Amy Adams is a fucking force of acting. The film kept my attention the entire runtime, and I empathized with the emotions that the mother felt: joy, exhaustion, sadness, loneliness, frustration, helplessness, empowerment, anger, chaos. It was a succinct, well-rounded film that captured real-life struggles of modern day parenting for mothers with a fantastical element to describe the mother’s feelings and journey. I thought Nightbitch was

GOOD

I watched Nightbitch on Hulu.

Wondering how my rating system works? Let me explain!