Courage often gets confused with bravado, especially in titles.
Sometimes it takes a little risk to encounter true greatness, and in the case of Marielle Heller’s new film, we hope that moviegoers will be attracted by its title, Nightbitch. This is a startling take on the contemporary state of motherhood and its place in society.
As the film unfolds, we see Heller (The Diary of a Teenage Girl) transform motherhood from a state of pathetic weakness into a powerful strength through a strange form of canine lycanthropy.
Movie trailers can be misleading, even deceitful or confusing, and Nightbitch trailers are confusing. The movie has been billed as black comedy, horror/thriller, satirical magic realism, and other genre combinations that don’t quite seem to capture its form. Despite its tantalizing trailers, this movie has more in common with classic tales of feminine strength and motherhood like Euripides’s Medea and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” than it does with Universal’s The Wolf Man.
Like its trailers and title, Nightbitch potentially confounds and resists many viewers, but complicated works often take time to be understood.”
Our story plays out in the desolate and alienating world of American suburbia, and its protagonist is a weary new mother (Amy Adams of Junebug and Night at the Museum) who has forfeited her career willingly to take on the complicated and seemingly lackluster task of raising a child (especially lackluster after giving up a promising career as an avant-garde artist).
The action begins with the average husband (played with sardonic naivete by Scoot McNairy of Killing Them Softly and Blood for Dust) leaving for work “filing reports in a hotel room.”
As anyone who has ever done it knows, parenting for hours or days alone is a trek into a lonesome and sometimes scary world of pieced-together programs, places, and activities that are inhabited mostly by other mothers and the people who run the places and activities that bring hope to the solo parent and help consume the lonely hours of servitude.
Indicatively, neither the mother nor her husband have names in the film, as they represent anyone who’s been here. Early on, she is at Book Babies at the library and shuns a trio of friendly women (great heroic mom portrayals by Zoë Chao, Mary Holland, and Archana Rajan) who are interested in her fellowship. The mother feels like she is different from them and even resents that mothers are the only other people attending these toddler attractions. She manages to escape them and retreat to the park.
The other mothers are the first of three prominent trios in the story, the other two groups being three strange dogs at the park and three girlfriends (and practicing artists) from graduate school who the mother no longer feels connected to in her new domestic life. This trio of trios pulls at her with different draws, and they reveal the significant imbalance in her life. She feels separate from the other moms of her new life and from the graduate school artist friends from her former life.
Enter the three dogs.
These dogs appear before her in the park. They begin showing up at her house at night. They lead her away to the remotest parts of the park where everything is grass and trees—greenery and a touch of wilderness in the heart of the suburbs.
The greatest thing this movie does is re-envision motherhood as a revolutionary act.”
She returns to the wild. The dogs bring more dogs and offerings of dead rabbits and mice. It is not long before the mother is running with them at night in feral abandon. In a preceding scene, we have seen her toddler son atop the mother, riding her like a beast of burden. Right after, she discovers a tuft of hair on her lower back. Six additional nipples follow on her chest and abdomen. A tail soon emerges. It is not long before she is out running with her pack at night in sublime animalistic release, first as a woman and then as what appears to be a husky or husky mix.
While these transformations are liberating, they are also terrifying and confusing. Soon after, the mother appeals to one of the most compelling characters in the movie: Norma, a mystic and mysterious librarian. The mother realizes Norma (Jessica Harper in an intriguing performance) is much more when the librarian recommends The Field Guide to Magical Women, a book with evidently questionable existence even in the world of the film.
The book provides a guide for our lone mother—ultimately the hero(ine) of this remarkable tale. She embraces her wild animal nature as a form of liberating if dangerous new power as a life-creating, life-celebrating woman—killing other creatures in exuberance during her nightly runs. This violence turns back on her own household until the transformation is complete. Following a final kill, the mother is framed behind the bars of a jungle gym in the park, an animal in a cage.
She banishes the husband and son (played recklessly and sweetly by the twins Emmett and Arleigh Snowden) and returns to her art, inspired by her bestial reveries and violence and inspired and informed by her art school history and friends. Her journey is transformed into a wonderful art show attended by all of the disparate groups that she has synthesized in her life to become a new person.
And the three strange dogs? They have completed their task. She dismisses them. There is a last benediction from Norma concerning those sage canines: “They called, and you answered.”
. . . It’s good movie fun with a serious topic, and it is destined to join other great works that have made us reconsider motherhood and its magic in a new light.”
This is a movie about mothers and motherhood, and throughout the film, we get scenes of another mother, the mother of the mother of this story, a mother she never understood, but has now come to peace with through her bizarre adventure.
The greatest thing this movie does is re-envision motherhood as a revolutionary act. Raising children is frustrating and soul-touching, comical and scary, and with the right mindset and outlook, it can be just as wonderful as creating evocative art. As the movie asserts, it is the original act of life-giving creation, and it must be re-appropriated from corporations that “make products that convince us that we’re horrible mothers” and a society that resists the incorporation of mothers and small children into its fabric.
Like its trailers and title, Nightbitch potentially confounds and resists many viewers, but complicated works often take time to be understood.
Get out and watch the film carefully—it’s good movie fun with a serious topic, and it is destined to join other great works that have made us reconsider motherhood and its magic in a new light.
Editor’s Note: Nightbitch is now playing at The SLO Film Center at the Palm Theatre.