Being a mother is the greatest joy in the world, but it also brings problems, exhaustion, and pain. Nothing in the world will ever make you happier or sadder, prouder or more tired. Because nothing is as complicated as helping someone develop their individuality while you are still fighting to preserve your own.

(Marguerite Kelly)

Nightbitch stands as a symbolic journey into the depths of feminine identity, a descent into the liminal space where a woman's body and spirit negotiate the tension between desire and imposition, freedom and obligation. Adapting Rachel Yoder’s novel, the director presents a narrative that transcends mere storytelling, becoming an existential manifesto about motherhood and womanhood in a world struggling to acknowledge the plurality of their identities.

The protagonist, an artist turned homemaker against her will, embodies the alienation of the creative self crushed under the weight of a role she loves but finds foreign. It’s the story of a woman who transitions from exhibiting her art at MoMA to a daily life of toil and routine—spending afternoons with other moms, cooking, shopping, and struggling to catch some sleep at night. Her husband, often away for work, maintains his lively demeanor, while loneliness becomes her only companion.

Here, the body—women’s primal vehicle—begins to rebel: sharp canine teeth, a heightened sense of smell, and even eight mammary glands emerge, not as grotesque deviations, but as a reclaiming of the primordial. It is the reawakening of an "inner animal" that society tried to suppress.

The transformation into a dog, which the protagonist experiences at night, is not alienation but liberation. Running through suburban streets becomes a political act, an escape from the gilded cage of a motherhood ideal that imprisons. Because "mother" is not the entirety of a woman’s identity; it is one of the many possibilities of being a woman. An identity that patriarchal society has imposed as all-encompassing, reducing the infinite complexity of femininity to a monolithic, sacred idea.

Nightbitch, through magical realism, rejects this linear narrative. The film does not exalt motherhood as an untouchable myth but reveals its brutality and beauty, sacrifice and resentment, light and shadow. In this vision, motherhood is not only creation but also destruction and rebirth: a transformative process forcing a confrontation with the darkest parts of oneself.

The figure of the husband here is not a villain but a symbol of the passive complicity of a culture that leaves women alone with the emotional and practical burden of parenting. His eventual awareness—though late—echoes the sentiment that "all he had to do was ask," as men often fail to intuit what is unspoken or implicit. It represents a call for shared and equitable parenting, where roles are not simply assigned but continually negotiated.

What Nightbitch achieves, with an irony that never diminishes the depth of its discourse, is to break the taboo surrounding the conflicting emotions many women feel. Because it is possible to deeply love a child and simultaneously yearn to be something else. To be mothers, but also lovers, workers, artists, wild animals running in the night.

This film does not offer solutions or answers; instead, it invites a radical embrace of doubt and complexity. It is a feminist act reclaiming women’s right to be everything without one choice excluding the other. It is an ode to the multiplicity of being, to the fierce joy of existing as a free body and spirit.

Compared to the idealized model of motherhood, perhaps women are becoming “bad mothers.” But for the first time in history, they are becoming authentic and real—because before being mothers, they want to be people.

(Elena Gianini Belotti)

30-Nov-2024 by Beatrice