Mother (Amy Adams) isn’t like other moms, she’s a cool mom. Other moms are pathetic, her slick stand-up comic style voice-over declares, and she would only befriend one if they were, “beautiful, smart, and hilarious.” Nightbitch, based on Rebecca Yoder’s novel of the same name, taps into cinema’s eternal desire for quirky, attractive female leads—’weird girls,’ if you will—and feminist adjacent themes with minimal substance beneath the surface. It’s undoubtedly a film that will perform well, particularly due to Adams’ engaging performance, and its broad appeal to moms everywhere. However, that doesn’t excuse its flawed and misguided purview into the realities of boy-mom life.
Nightbitch quickly sets up the common trope of the unhappy housewife and absent father duo, relying on its familiarity to avoid unnecessary setup. This leaves plenty of time to focus on the surprisingly concise plot: Mother is unhappy. Mother becomes a dog. Mother separates from Father (Scoot McNairy) just long enough to stage a successful art exhibition. For a film that spends so much time monologuing about how mothers are more than just caregivers, we don’t see much of Mother actively disputing this claim—we don’t even get her name.
Ultimately, Nightbitch finds value in Mother’s rants about the hardships of child rearing, her frustration with Father’s lack of involvement, and her feelings of entrapment as a mom. While the story has raw potential to be a cutting comedic film about modern motherhood, it’s significantly let down by the didacticism of Mother. She doesn’t just hint at her struggles—she spells them out, telling us exactly why being a mother is so hard, exactly what she is thinking, and exactly how she is feeling, so that the ‘show, don’t tell’ rule isn’t just broken, it’s long dead and buried. The jokes made are ones that any chronically online person has heard via MomTok before. The critiques of uninvolved fathers were made in Bad Moms eight years ago. Mother’s constant commentary feels less like authentic expression and more like a clumsy attempt at a YouTube video essay, making the experience not just jarring, but condescending—implying that the audience wouldn’t understand her distress without being explicitly told.
By spending most of its time lecturing, Nightbitch misses out on a rich yet small vein of werewolf cinema that could have been a ripe arsenal to draw from in its depictions of feminine animality. Unlike cult classics such as Ginger Snaps and When Animals Dream, this film squanders any potential of body horror. To give credit to the source material, Yoder’s novel thrives in the feral, offering plenty of opportunities for the film to amp up the horror to explore a heightened experience of women’s changing bodies. Though Nightbitch markets itself as a horror, it’s far from it—its moments of animal transformation seem to be inspired by the Air Bud series, so it’s hard to see what is horrifying at all about it. Many of the moments of body horror appear as quickly as they are forgotten and I’m left wondering what happened to the multiple nipples Mother develops, why do we never see them again? These missed opportunities leave the film feeling toothless, failing to carry over the weirdness of the original text. Though the novel isn’t without flaws, it at least embraced its strangeness, something the film sorely lacks.
Nightbitch will certainly appeal to those it claims to represent—middle-class, heterosexual white women who put aside a fulfilling career to care for their children full-time. However, the surface-level celebrations of motherhood and idealised link between mothers and wild animals risk coming off as ignorant. Much like Barbie’s brand of pop white feminism, Nightbitch wastes time attempting to make profound statements without any real systemic impact. The film’s resolution—wherein all Mother had to do was have a little distance from her husband and return to her career—isn’t radical or particularly progressive. In fact, it’s easy to imagine this film doing well amongst tradwife types who might see its nature-as-femininity narrative as an endorsement of the nuclear family ideal. Yet, Mother’s explicitly quirky persona is designed to set her apart as ‘not like other moms,’ but in doing so, reproduces the same white feminism problem that plagues the ‘weird girl’ fiction world for the screen.
Despite the sticky discourse of feminism fraught in Nigthbitch, if just for its provocative title and canine conceit, it will inevitably become popular amongst the femcels and self-appointed weird girlies, even if they don’t watch it. It will be lauded for its gender politics regardless, because everyone loves a weird white girl, and everyone will sympathize with having an incompetent husband. Ultimately, the film is forgettable, and I’m left wishing for a grisly, gritty, bloodthirsty vision of motherhood.
