Yesterday, Searchlight Pictures released the first official trailer for Nightbitch, the Amy Adams-led horror-comedy that’s due to impress at the Toronto International Film Festival this weekend before hitting theaters in December.
The film stars Amy Adams as a woman known only as “Mother” (and like that, we’re off to the races), who puts her career on hold to focus on being a stay-at-home mom to her young son. It doesn’t take long for the usual motherhood stressors to work their way into Mother’s life; cleaning up after the child, putting the child to bed, lack of sleep, a husband who seems incapable of comprehending the position she’s in, and the peculiar sense that she’s slowly transforming into a dog.
Nightbitch‘s plot, however, is not the popular talking point; it appears that Searchlight thought they could pull a fast one on the denizens of X by sneaking a title like Nightbitch into the zeitgeist, but the internet’s ever-reliable puritan sensibilities quickly led them to batting their eyes over a Hollywood picture sneaking “bitch” into the title.
Others felt a need to take Nightbitch at face value, and to completely ignore the fact that it’s based on a very well-received novel of the same name, to boot.
Social media is, of course, no place for critical thought; it’s all about being as animated and reactionary as possible, and with Nightbitch serving up the premise that it does, the trailer makes for easy scorn fodder for anyone who’s solely committed to scorning things.
But let’s examine things a bit more closely and sincerely. Nightbitch, the 2021 debut novel by Rachel Yoder, is only textually about a woman turning into a dog. What it’s actually about is the pressures and contradictions that motherhood places on a woman’s social and physiological being. Motherhood is a task that somehow demands both an animalistic commitment and a mechanical unbreakability; this is where Nightbitch‘s interests lie. By all observations, the film seems to be channeling a similar energy here.
Moreover, film explores these ideas in ways the book never could; Nightbitch might not necessarily be better than the novel, but there’s inherent value in the simple act of diversifying the presentation of an idea like the transformation of motherhood, medium-wise. Meanwhile, the importance of the idea alone speaks for itself, to say nothing of the space it might occupy in the genre of horror-comedy.
But nevermind looking deeper; let’s all laugh at the weird-looking movie with “bitch” in the title instead. Surely that’s a much better use of one’s time. Jokes aside, watching this movie for opinion-forming purposes would genuinely be a good use of one’s time, if one insists on talking about it, which we can all do when Nightbitch hits theaters on Dec. 6.