This was never going to fly, but what a poster
dir: Marielle Heller
2025
In this ongoing series / festival of recent movies in the “maternal rage” sub-genre, which has seen something of a renaissance recently, there is this flick. These are important flicks with women in key roles, not only as the main character but as the writers / directors themselves, and I’m not even sure that they’re here because of awards-bait reasons (although that has to be a factor, because none of them were box office gold). I am interested in them because they carry very different messages about how women deal with the underlying disappointments that come with getting the brass ring we are constantly told they should want and need (it’s a biological imperative, don’t you know).
These ‘big three’ flicks I’m alluding to are If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Nightbitch and Die, My Love. There is no doubt Jennifer Lawrence is going to nominated; I hope and am pretty sure Rose Byrne will get a guernsey for If I Had Legs. I don’t think anyone was going to die on a hill over Amy, poor Amy getting any shiny ornaments for her mantelpiece for this flick.
First of all, the title. That’s a hard sell especially to the demographic you’re aiming at.
All these films are explicitly about the same thing; the regret that comes with becoming a mum, the resentment towards others who are not recent mothers; the resentment towards others who are recent mothers who seem to be doing it easier or have more support; doing everything for the household, the baby and themselves even if they’re not ‘single mothers’, it just feels that way; losing one’s sense of self; seeing the death of the illusions one had about themselves and their self-worth that isn’t connected to becoming a mother, and so on.
When I say these ideas are universally relatable, I mean many if not most mums might be able to relate through their own experiences, other lumps like me might acknowledge their righteous and justified rage, but not relate to it personally, but at least recognise how the “system” benefits me and jerks like me to the detriment of mothers everywhere.
When people talk about who does what in the home, within a family, within a couple with a new kid, the distribution of labour we know still falls along gendered lines. So almost nothing has changed on that front even if some guy somewhere emptied the dishwasher properly for once or brings the washing in from the line and dumps it all on the floor thinking the job is done: women / mothers are still “expected” to do everything regardless of whether they work or not and regardless of whether it’s crushing their souls or not.
Men are still like “but I worked all week, I need some time to relax?” or “but I spent all afternoon doing the lawns and building something out of stone and wood in the backyard, you can’t expect me to vacuum, make dinner, feed the baby and the dog, and give the kid their bath just because it needs doing”, and all is right in the world.
For us, for the guys. For the women who feel compelled to turn into wild animals in order to escape, well, I guess the story is different from their perspective.
This is a confused, confusing, all too pat, yet superficially ‘empowering’ version of this kind of story. It is less a desperate cry to be seen and heard, less a primal scream and more a personal story squeezed through an Oprah-like lens in order to make it more palatable to mass audiences, even mass audiences of women who could possibly relate but maybe shouldn't.
It’s not an easy watch, but not for the reasons you might think. I had actually tried watching this flick way, way earlier in 2025, and gave up because I was cringing so painfully that I couldn’t continue. So only now when I launched into this idea of reviewing these similarly themed movies to see what worked and what didn’t, did I force myself to continue watching it past its first 10 minutes.
In deep contrast to the earlier flick that I watched in this maternal Viking saga, the main character is at the end of her tether and her patience, but is still holding back. She says and does the things she wishes she could have said or done, but then the film would backtrack and show that she never actually said that; she just imagined it, and instead chose to say the banal thing or give the banal response.
She, being the character played by Amy Adams, the great Amy Adams, wishes she could tell the slags in her mother’s group, here referred to as “Book Babies”, but you know it’s practically the same thing, to get fucked, or to express just how fucking exhausted and over it she really is, she’ll just say “oh yeah, being a mom is so great and fulfilling.”
Two years into her maternal journey, this unnamed character is irritated by her days being consumed with looking after this child, the demands of which are relentless, only to see much of her nights be eaten up by trying to get this monster to sleep.
Once that finally happens she has barely enough time to leaf through a scrapbook or a catalogue and lament the fact that her artistic career has been put on hold for two years. Even if she had the inspiration to create, she’s too exhausted anyway.
Her husband (Scoot McNairy) isn’t particularly or obviously a piece of shit, but he isn’t there most of the time, travelling for work. When he is there he never knows where anything that might be needed is, or how to do basic things like bathe a child or perhaps where the sunscreen is, but he’s not meant to be an unfeeling ogre. That weaponised or strategic incompetence is plopped in there just to get women’s heads nodding “uh huh, that’s right, he doesn’t know how to operate the washing machine but he’ll sit there for hours playing on his Playstation 5 and then say “wanna fuck?” when he gets bored of that!”
You don’t employ Scoot McNairy to play a complete piece of shit. He’s too nice a guy. You hire him to play a character who doesn’t understand the full extent of what his partner is going through, but not because he’s an indifferent arsehole; it’s just because he’s a clueless guy who thinks he’s helping when he says things like “happiness is a choice.”
He’s there because you need that character not to get it at first, but to eventually get it, because this flick is determined, absolutely determined to work towards a glib happy ending.
When the mother’s frazzledness reaches its peak, she does two things: starts remembering her upbringing as a Mennonite(!), which comes completely out of the blue, and the other, more relevant element is that she starts turning into a dog.
Like, at first, the movie goes to some lengths to establish that, yes, this mommy is not the kind that’s bounced back and is wearing sculpted activewear jogging everywhere with the pram in between salon appointments. She looks a bit feral. But the flick says this: many of your miseries as a mommy come from thinking, thinking, thinking. Self-consciousness is what makes you miserable, pretending you’re some fancy non-corporeal being. You are an animal, so best to get back in touch with that in order to really start living.
It is… comical in how it plays out, but it’s not particularly funny, I didn’t completely understand whether it was happening literally or metaphorically, and it seemed like a lot of a fucking stretch. For a time, when Mommy decides to do her daily routines in dog like ways, like eat lots of red meat, sometimes from dog bowls (she assures her husband that they are new bowls, unlicked by doggish tongues, as if that’s the issue), gets her son to sleep effortlessly in a new doggy bed, runs around at night with a pack of neighbourhood dogs, who leave her dead animals as presents, everything seems to be getting better.
But that would be too simplistic, even for this flick. We all know that society is fucked and does terrible things to women, but this flick is canny enough at least to know that the mother’s internalised restrictions are just as oppressive as anything else someone might say or do. When she reconnects with some old art wanker friends, they are all still impossibly thin, glamorous and chic even if they’re parents as well, although they didn’t move to the suburbs and become total shlumps. And yet even though we’ve been watching her killing animals, literally changing into a dog, and eating raw meat, at this particular dinner where her own dysfunction is emphasised as being ‘her fault’, she chooses to eat a kale salad.
Oddly, everyone else is eating the meaty sustenance she would prefer to be gnawing at, but she forces herself to gulp large globs of kale in order to deliver an internal monologue (she doesn’t breath a word of this to the art wanker friends), but just keeps gulping this awful stuff and thinking about how she’s subverted herself, pushed her sense of sense down deep, in order to… I don’t know, I got lost in the midst of this, because I kept thinking “kale isn’t served like that in restaurants: they generally want customers to come back / tip” and “if it’s a salad, why would they boil lumps of kale and serve it like that?”
And then I got my answer: It was so she could blurt it all out onto the table, steal someone’s hamburger, and generally act like a fucking lunatic, in order to convince her old acquaintances to cut her off completely or at least not make eye contact.
That’s probably not even the worst scene in the flick. I mean, I’m not always great with body horror in flicks, but there is a cutesy level upon which they parallel the generally unachievable beauty standards “expected” of women in order to comply with societal “expectations”, whether they’re recent mothers or not, with this increasing leaning in to her feral, wild nature, being a tail bursting forth from a boil or other dumb shit I won’t go into. Still, it’s the stuff this director makes her do before she either literally or metaphorically transforms into a dog that made me laugh but not because it was genuinely funny or intended to be funny.
It’s pretty lame / weak sauce stuff, even if it doesn’t completely derail where the director intends for the train to go. When Mommy is running around with the dog pack, speaking more honestly with the women in the mother’s group and getting them to open up about the shittier aspects of their motherhood / relationships / lives, kicked her partner out for not supporting her properly, she finds the time to not only get an exhibition slot at a gallery, but do a whole bunch of works, sculptures, large paintings, incorporating elements and characters and slabs of meat that we’ve seen earlier in the movie into the work, into a night so successful that all her old art wanker friends are impressed, she feels valued and validated by the world because the show is a success, and her partner realises “doing art is important to my wife, the artist, who I met when she was an artist, and then I thought she wouldn’t have to art ever again because baby, but it seems art is still her thing so” and apologises to her.
And then everything is so literally hunky dory that she has another baby.
I mean… holy fuck. Sorry to spoil the very ending of this flick, but honestly, you’ve given me very mixed messages in your strange argument / diatribe, and then negated everything with that ending. I get ambivalence and ambiguity, but Jesus Christ, I can’t handle the whiplash.
We haven’t, for the longest time, been arguing that any women think they can do it all and that it will be easy. The point of many of these kinds of stories seems to say “motherhood is difficult even if you have wealth and you’re white”, which is true, I get that. The woman who wrote the book this is based on (Rachel Yoder) lived these experiences and transformed them into this, in order to reach a mass audience. What seems like a strange detail of her Mennonite upbringing is real, for her. Probably the dog transformation stuff not as much. But I get the yearning she has, not just for understanding, but for an older woman to give her the benefit of her sage wisdom, to not only tell her that things will eventually be okay, but how and why. Some of those scenes with her mother, when both were younger, are amongst the only affecting ones in the movie.
So I get why there’s the weird librarian character played by the legendary Jessica Harper (in the present). I don’t get why they needed to weird things up even more by having her seem either like a supernatural figure or someone who is either forgetful or has an identical twin who doesn’t like the protagonist. She even hands her a mystical book that will help her tap into her primal urges and rediscover herself. I was just amazed that she didn’t hand her a copy of Nightbitch, by Rachel Yoder…
I mean, baffling decisions, so many of them. Much of the time I can appreciate the choices Amy Adams makes as a character, in anything she’s in, because she’s a great actor, and has given so many great performances. Obviously a flick like this, a performance like this might resonate differently in different audience members. To me it wasn’t a great performance, and I have to put that down to the script, because I’ve seen her be great in terrible films, and she’s not great here. She’s not always believable, which is astounding to me.
Nightbitch is the kind of story that probably lands better with people who say things like “you go, girl” or “yummy mummy” or use the word empowered, but only ever unironically.
6 reasons not to even get started on what happens to the cat out of 10
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“I could crush a walnut with my vagina.” – okay, but I don’t remember asking, mommy - Nightbitch
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