Everything I lost when I had a baby

On ‘Nightbitch’ and leaving a part of yourself behind

This week I went to a screening of Nightbitch, the new film (in UK and US cinemas from today) about a harried stay-at-home mother who slowly turns into a dog. Honestly some of the earlier scenes felt like I’d walked into a documentary of my own 2022, when I had my first child.

Based on the 2021 book of the same name by Rachel Yoder, the film’s director, Marielle Heller (Can You Ever Forgive Me?, The Diary Of A Teenage Girl), has been describing the movie as “a comedy for women, but a horror movie for men” which is a pretty great description. But I definitely found some moments horrifying (the memory of parent toddler groups - she attends one called Book Babies - for starters).

Amy Adams plays a former gallery worker who has quit her career to care for her two-year-old son. She is sleep deprived, completely bored by the repetitiveness of her new domestic life, and frustrated by the ache inside her for her former identity as an artist. As she grows increasingly resentful of her largely absent husband who has a propensity for galling statements such as “I would kill to stay home with him every day”, the internalised anger eventually forces her to come undone: she gains a heightened sense of smell, finds six new nipples on her torso, develops a craving for raw meat, before she eventually shapeshifts into a red husky (that’s not a spoiler btw, if the title itself didn’t give it away, it’s literally in the trailer).

In Nightbitch, the repetitive ennui of looking after a small child, day in, day out, is nicely played out in the film’s opening credits. ‘Mother’ (Adams’ character has no name, naturally) is shown making the same frozen hash brown breakfast on a loop, re-reading Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site at bedtime, and pushing her son on the swings, over and over, in some sort of maternal fever dream. We are immediately dropped into the monotony of her life.

While the film is technically a body horror (it’s nowhere near as grotesque as The Substance although one scene in which ‘Mother’ discovers her new dog tail will test your limits), the film is full of very funny bit parts that anyone who has looked after a young child full-time will find familiar.

Nightbitch asks a number of interesting questions, none more so than: what happens when you lose your place in the world by becoming a mother and how do you reclaim it?

I, like so many women, can relate hard to all this. I gave up plenty when I had a child: long Saturday afternoons in pubs, lie-ins (and its glorious older sister: slob days), full bladder control.

But there were bigger, more serious changes. I looked after my child full-time until he was 16 months old, much longer than most, until we finally secured him a place at nursery. A privilege, perhaps, but it did come at a cost.