The Movie Every Moms' Group Is Talking About

My unsolicited opinion on Nightbitch, PLUS: Some feels on year-end recaps.

Hi from Northern California, where we’re approaching the tail end of a three-week visit to the grandparents. We’ve got a ~16-hour road trip in the rear-view mirror and a cross-country flight up ahead 🫠.

I typically don’t watch much TV, but with a holiday-season brain of mush and a still-broken toe that makes outdoor activities a bit of a challenge, I recently began watching The Diplomat. It stars Keri Russell, who has dropped into my favorite Cobble Hill coffee shop on numerous occasions and has a place near Hotel Lilien…so we’re basically best friends. But after my moms’ group chat blew up with commentary on Nightbitch following it’s Christmas week release on Hulu, I felt compelled to abruptly switch gears, beg my parents for their streaming login, and watch the movie immediately. Wowza.

Let’s talk Nightbitch.

I was warned that this movie received awful ratings, so first hedged my bets by reading some reviews. One of the first I encountered went something like, “I’m a man not a mom so this wasn’t for my demographic.” Well, suffice it to say that I barely finished the movie’s opening credits when it became very clear that actually, this movie should be required reading material for moms and dads, sure, but also anyone in this world who was brought into it by a woman and has ever so briefly wondered why she sometimes loses it.

Moms know weird shit happens to their bodies and mental health during pregnancy and thereafter! It’s the rest of society who really need to see scenes like the one where a new mom’s cyst is pierced to reveal an actual tail. (It sounds gross and weird and it is…but it pales in comparison to the strangeness of childbirth, breastfeeding, etc.)

Because Nightbitch is about so much more than magical realism and ick factor, I’ll take it from the top…and keep nagging my husband to watch it. (Oh, Daaaviiiid!)

The gist

The film chronicles an artist-turned-nameless-stay-at-home toddler mom (Amy Adams) who becomes fed up by the career pause and primary childcare role that she’d agreed to. Anger, frustration, exhaustion, and grief all contribute to a metamorphosis: She begins to develop dog-like traits like a heightened sense of smell, affinity for meat, sharper teeth, random fur growth, that tail I mentioned above, and even teats.

Given the primal nature of childbirth and breakdown of all things sane and familiar about our bodies and minds in the postpartum period, this fantastical turn of plot came as no real surprise or horror to me. (If you know anyone who didn’t lose at least a little bit of their mind, body, and self after childbirth…I’ll have what she’s having.) I actually appreciated that the extended metaphor involved a domesticated species rather than, say, a monster, which is how I felt most of the time in the early months of motherhood. (For context: My youngest child was born just over two years ago, so I’m technically over the postpartum hump, according to most medical pros.)

Some themes we need to talk about

At first, the story felt a bit cliché, but then I realized the word I was looking for was even worse: familiar. The mom’s angry internal dialogues might as well have been streamed from my conscience after each of my kids was born; although I couldn’t understand how she was able to keep her cool, I could basically finish her sentences on my first watch, no problem.

Lots of the themes that came up throughout the film are often discussed among new moms, but never, to my knowledge, accurately portrayed on the big screen. Fictionalized depictions of early motherhood tend to nail the under-eye bags and stained clothes, but they often bring in humor to dilute things and extend a sort of forgiveness to unhelpful fathers.

While sure, I like to laugh, I appreciated the way this movie delved into marital micro-aggressions toward a not-so-bad dad head-on and without excusing him as the butt of the joke. In fact, some of his benign offenses made me want to strangle a father, any father:

• When he suggests happiness is a choice moms can make if they just set and stick to a schedule (LOL you try it, I’ll wait…)

• When he implies that it’s better and easier to stay at home with your toddler than performing paid labor, *simultaneously cackles and cries*

• When he asks, “what comes next?” in his own kid’s daily routine. YOU TELL ME.

• When he volunteers to handle bath time only to send calls for help from the bathroom 42 times in a row, all whilst “supervising” from the toilet with his eyes on his phone screen

• When he dismisses his wife’s postpartum health concerns to the point where she turns to a librarian rather than a medical professional to figure out what the fuck is going on in her body and brain. (We’re talking about a woman who—*SPOILER ALERT*—literally slays her pet cat! And no one, not even her husband, suggests an SSRI before it got to that point. Can you even?!)

To be clear, the movie really isn’t about man-hating or dads not doing enough—it’s an ode to the bad-ass, god-like humans who create life and change forever as a result of it.

An important theme, for me, was the exploration of duality, the idea that you can miss and mourn your old self, and still sally forth as a mom with zero regrets and a truly bottomless bucket of love, adoration, and appreciation for your kid(s). To feel these things (along with utter exhaustion) all at once—to want to run away as fast as you can, but also feel so consumed with yearning for your child that you could swallow them up in one gulp—it me, so many times over. That’s motherhood for ya.

The scene that really got me

At one point in the movie, the mom goes to meet a group of grad school friends at chic city restaurant. You’d think that this return to her pre-parenthood habitat would revive her, replacing some of what she’d lost and clearly misplaced through becoming a mother.

But every inch of that scene—from being saddled by baby weight and ordering a sad, compensatory salad, to feeling middle-aged, unsophisticated, out of place, and utterly irrelevant with absolutely nothing to add to civilized conversation—rang true for me. (Sometimes, I’ve found it harder to be drop-kicked into my old life than to simply steer clear of it.)

One dinner guest in this scene was a working mother with full-time childcare; she seemed much more at peace with parenthood than Amy's character. I was left wondering—and not for the first time—whether new moms who return to work with full-coverage experience the same loss of self as stay-at-home moms. (Having returned to work without returning to the office after my first child was born at the onset of the pandemic, I identify more with the latter, jfyi.)

*SPOILER ALERT*

Ultimately, the mom briefly separates from her husband who begins to take their toddler overnight on weekends. Brief breaks from parenting give her headspace and the patience to suppress primal urges and lean into motherhood with more joy. She goes back to creating art and benefits from the boost in efficiency that many new moms experience when their time is returned to them in small bouts. (The number of freelance articles I used to pound out during nap time was…outrageous.)

The movie ends with this same mom, who’s seriously been through the ringer but ultimately gets back together with her husband, kneeling on her living room floor as she labors like her mother and her mother’s mother to deliver a baby girl. It’s a true full-circle, let’s-take-it-from-the-top moment that seriously tapped into my tear wells: I also struggled to adjust to parenthood and willingly went back to the start line to bring a little girl into the world—I’ll just leave that there.

~In summary~

Thanks in part to a few homework-y monologues that filed formal complaints on this country’s lack of parental support, Nightbitch made it very clear that time and space are truly essential for a mother’s mental health, clarity, and productivity, no matter how much love they have for their kids, partner, or parenthood. (No notes here!) It also reminded me why other moms can make fast and wonderful friends, with all of us together here in the trenches.

I walked away from the closing credits feeling empowered and proud to partake in this universal community of women who understand the highs, lows, magic, and overall weirdness of motherhood. It’s a truly wild journey that I don’t think I’ll ever recover from, but still: I’d trade it for nothing.

I didn’t manage to pound out a year-end Instagram recap and honestly just can’t with social media right now—it’s where every parent seems to have a better system than I do for sorting photos, filing memories, and spinning them all into flawless highlight reels.

I guess it has a little to do with the fact that as a freelancer with work days and weeks that have no beginning or end, I don’t really feel all the feels when the calendar year draws to a close. For me, there’s no neat time of year to look backward and forward and set fresh intentions, a realization that’s both overwhelming and liberating.

More authentic to me are those off-the-cuff, low-season reflections. Shedding light on one child at a time around their birthdays is my favorite way to process time and how far we’ve all come. Shay’s 5th(!) birthday falls at the end of Q1, so I have big plans to spend the first three months of this year planning his Hot Wheels birthday party and wondering how 4T pants now reveal the ankles of a child I grew myself from a pea-sized embryo.

In the meantime, I’m feeling ever so grateful to have this platform, a place where I can embrace the chaos of parenthood *and* my calling. I fell just one subscriber short of my year-end goal—*inserts not-so-subtle hint to subscribe below!*—but I’m still so excited to be here and hope you are, too. Happy New Year!