There’s a moment in Nightbitch, a film exploring the ferality of motherhood through the eyes of a woman who believes she’s turning into a dog, that made every one of my hairs stand on end.
Playing the film’s lead, Mother – she tellingly isn’t given a real name – Amy Adams is having an argument with her husband (Scoot McNairy). He accuses her of changing since having their first child and becoming a stay-at-home mum, asking what happened to the brilliantly weird and intelligent woman he married.
“She died in childbirth,” Mother whips back; there’s a serrated edge to her voice made of broken razor blades.
She died in childbirth.
I can scarcely think of a more powerful line in cinema.
I am not a mother, but I am a woman with a lot of other women in her life – sisters, aunts, friends so close that they feel like family – and have therefore seen behind the curtain into the mania of early parenthood many times over. The primal physicality of it all; the sheer, aching banality. There is so much joy too, of course, and a love so electrifying and all encompassing that it teeters on the brink of terror.
But love doesn’t cancel out the reality that this line, delivered with searing, stinging brutality by Adams, sums up so incisively. In gaining a whole new person, women inevitably sacrifice something of themselves; cast in the role of mother, they must painstakingly rebuild a new identity that incorporates who they were while acknowledging that this new status means they’re forever changed.
The truth of this spills out behind closed doors, like a confessional, the sisterhood swapping stories in hushed secrecy. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve held friends close while they cry in hormonal exhaustion; while they share the way that their bodies have changed and no longer feel their own; while they question their sanity and occasionally ask, desperately, “Why did I do this again?”
It’s my sister, weak with infection and hysterical from lack of sleep, weeping on the bathroom floor and saying she missed her husband when he was standing barely three feet away – because she suddenly realised that it would never again be just the two of them. It’s the friend with post-natal depression who admitted, her voice cracking with guilt, that she kept fantasising about putting her baby in a cardboard box and leaving him outside the front door. It’s my mother, who still recounts in shrill, frenzied tones, “You never slept, darling! You never slept!”
But though these traumas are shared in private, living memories passed between women and held in our collective consciousness, we rarely – if ever – see them reflected in popular culture. Previous films have explored this othering of mothering through an abstract and chilling prism: think the surrealist archetype presented in Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!, or the literal horror of what’s growing inside Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby.
In gaining a whole new person, women inevitably sacrifice something of themselves
Nightbitch, adapted from Rachel Yoder’s debut novel of the same name, feels distinctly different. It holds up a mirror to the true barbarity of procreation: workaday tedium and drudgery alongside a profound loss of self. The film has had mixed reviews – the whole “is she turning into a dog?” schtick feels a bit patchy, the film unsure whether to play for laughs, present it as fantasy, or go down the full body horror route – but is arguably one of the most honest and profoundly moving portrayals of motherhood immortalised on screen.
We see Adams’s character live some version of a near-identical day, over and over, cooking her son the same breakfast, cleaning up the same mess, taking him to the same park, reading the same books, cringing at the same Mommy And Me-type class at the local library. Answering “I used to be” when someone asks if she’s an artist, Mother finds herself adrift and rudderless in this new world where she no longer feels anything but mother.
Her useless husband is frequently absent with work; upon his return, he’s more like a second child than a real partner. We see the crushing burden of the mental load that women are more often than not expected to shoulder alone – when Husband (pointedly not called Father) blithely asks why Mother hasn’t bought more milk, you can feel the air between them crackle with contemptuous fury. (“For what it’s worth, I would kill to stay home with him every day,” he says at another point – and if looks could kill, he’d be a pile of ashes on the floor.)
At the same time, Mother’s body is undergoing all kinds of transformations: fur in strange places, extra nipples, sharper teeth. She feels she is connecting to something “primal”, while at the same time worrying that she is “never going to be smart, happy or thin – ever again”.
This raw, nuanced portrayal of motherhood – its animalistic quality, its jumble of complex emotions, its disproportionate demands of women in a sphere still steeped in inequality, however “right on” heterosexual couples might have considered themselves to be before becoming parents – feels particularly vital right now. Canine transfiguration aside, it offers in some ways a hyperrealism that’s a much-needed antidote to the current resurgence of “tradwife” culture and mumfluencers framing motherhood as some kind of aesthetic lifestyle choice. We’re bombarded with social media videos of thin, beautiful, impeccably dressed stay-at-home mothers presenting an insanely unattainable version of family life: children who never seem to cry or make mess; beige and cream homes that are forever clean and tidy; all-natural snacks made from scratch by women so flawless that they look more AI than human (I’m looking at you, Nara Smith).
But it’s simply not real – anyone who’s ever been or met a mother will tell you that. It does a disservice to all of us, creating a fantasy image that no one, however hard they try, can possibly live up to. It’s part of the same nonsense school of thought that tells women they can never, ever admit that motherhood is hard work; that they sometimes hate it; that they love their kids to distraction but periodically find them infuriating.
And it also does a disservice by flattening out the most incredible parts of having children – the unadulterated awe and elemental magic of it all. “Do you ever feel like the big secret is that we are gods?” Mother says in wonder to a group of women during Nightbitch. “We f***ing create life – we are so powerful.”
Motherhood is about as far as you can get from a bland, pretty Instagram post. It is so much more – more visceral, more terrifying, more astonishing, more punishing, more elating, more rewarding, more, more, more of everything. Thank goodness there’s finally a film telling that story.
