Nightb–ch

Movie Review

“I love being a mom.”

So a Mother says to her friend in the grocery store—the one who took her job at the art gallery after Mother (the only name given to the character) decided to stay at home with her newborn son. And she believes it. Kinda-sorta-sometimes.

Oh, she loves her son, no question. But when she signed on for this stay-at-home-mom thing, Mother didn’t quite realize that the gig involved spending every waking hour with the little guy. (And given that the little guy avoids sleep like boiled liver, those waking hours add up.) Or that it would involve so many frozen hashbrowns and so much mac-and-cheese. Or that she’d be quite so angry all the time.

Also, she didn’t realize that it would turn her into a dog.

Yeah, you heard right: a dog.

It’s a bit awkward, that. The hair in strange places, the sharper teeth, the extra teets. The insatiable desire to hunt and kill isn’t, y’know, the thing you share with the moms at Book Babies.

Still, when she turns fully canine after a long day with the kiddo, a night romping through the neighborhood on four legs is a nice change of pace.

Positive Elements

Nightb–ch is about motherhood. And while it emphasizes how hard being a mom can be, it never minimizes its joys, either. In the end, we know that Mother really does love being a mom; she’d just like to be other things, too.

In flashback, we see that Mother’s own mom struggled with some of the same feelings and, um, possible doggy transformations, that Mother does. But Mother’s mom reassures her daughter that even though she sometimes runs into the night on all fours, she still loves her daughter, and she’ll always be the mom’s first priority. “I am your mama forever,” she says. “And I will always come back.”

Indeed, the film is, in many ways, a celebration of motherhood, of how powerful and important and awe-inspiring the state of motherhood inherently is.

But it’s a hard state, too, and the movie does an effective job of reminding us all that moms could use some help. Mother’s husband is often away on long business trips, and he doesn’t pick up a lot of slack when he’s home—until he realizes just how much work Mother has been doing. He eventually realizes that he’s not been as supportive as he could or should’ve been, and he does his best to make it up to her. Mother also falls in with a group of other moms, too—and they become a source of support and (relative) sanity.

Spiritual Elements

“Do you ever feel like the big secret (about motherhood) is that we are gods?” Mother asks her friends. “We make life! We’re so powerful!” she turns to a pregnant friend and says, “You are this miraculous goddess growing life as we speak!”

Motherhood and the ability to carry life are indeed pretty miraculous—but Nightb–ch takes that miracle down some rather unorthodox roads.

In flashback, we learn that Mother grew up in a strict, religious, possibly Mennonite community: Mother’s mom sings the hymn “In the Sweet By and By” in a church choir as Mother—a little girl at the time—looks on. Mother seems to have abandoned those religious roots, and she talks about how she saw her childhood as something she needed to escape from. But the images we have of Mother’s mom practicing her faith feel—at least onscreen—mostly positive.

But those flashbacks also contain evidence of less Christian practices. Another woman—possibly Mother’s grandmother—brews up a concoction in the kitchen that includes a chicken foot. This scene doesn’t come with any additional context, but the movie seems to suggest that this woman’s cooking may have something to do with these mysterious canine transformations.

Now, the movie never really clears up what’s going on with these transformations themselves. The film’s magical realism plays coy with their reality. But if we take the film literally, we must take those transformations as real and accept them as something supernatural.

As Mother tries to research her own apparent transformations, she goes to the library and checks out a book called A Field Guide to Magical Women. The librarian describes it as a mythical ethnography study, and Mother reads (in narration mode) about women who believe they turn into birds. She also reads about the Hindu goddess Sarama, who takes the form of a female dog and is reputed to be “the mother to all clawed creatures.” There’s also a reference to the fabled three-headed Chimera in the book, which is said to be a symbol of motherhood.

While eating a plate of kale, Mother tries to imagine herself as a “zen cow.”

Sexual & Romantic Content

Early on in the movie, Mother is simply too tired for intimacy. When her husband—home after several days away—hints at wanting sex, Mother turns him down flat, telling him that she just doesn’t want to be touched by anything. “And also I have eight nipples now and I fear you’re be repulsed,” she adds. We see those nipples in one scene when Mother unbuttons her shirt (revealing her bra as well).

After Mother slips into that kinda-sorta dog state of mind, she’s more receptive. After a nocturnal run as a dog, Mother takes a shower to wash all the dirt off her body. Her husband sees her, says, “You’re so dirty!” and asks if he can join her. The two make out in the shower (nothing critical is shown) and clearly begin having sex.

In another scene, the two are again engaged in intimate activities. We see movement and sexual noises (but don’t see any explicit nudity), and Mother begs her husband to bite her neck.

One of Mother’s friends confesses that she used to be a stripper before she became a mom. Mother talks about her sex life. She and her husband separate for a time, and the husband talks about how his apartment complex is filled with “recently divorced dads.”

A birthing scene depicts the exposed flank of the mother. (She’s wearing only a bra, which we also see.) Mother shows the camera a bit of skin elsewhere as she probes her body for unexpected hair growth. We hear a couple of references to nipples. Mother mentions that she could “crush a walnut with my vagina.”

Violent Content

“I always thought that motherhood was a weak state of being,” Mother tells us, referring to a time before she actually became a mom. “But motherhood is a far more primal, active thing than that. It is probably the most violent experience a human can have aside from death itself. A child’s first act is violence against the woman who created it. Yet still the mother loves the child with the most powerful love known in the universe.”

Mother doubles down on that quote, reminding us that motherhood is brutal from the very beginning. She stresses how babies are born in a wash of blood or are physically cut out of the mother’s body with a knife. And in her post-partum artwork, she creates a show depicting paintings of mothers holding knives and dead animals. Her other art includes mobiles of animal skeletons and even some taxidermy sculptures positioned on a playground merry-go-round.

The first sign that Mother is somehow changing comes in an unusual way: Neighborhood dogs seem inexplicably interested in her. One night, she steps outside her porch to find more than a dozen, seemingly waiting for her. At first, they greet her with enthusiasm—but they soon begin to bite and tear her clothes. The next morning, she tells her son that she had the weirdest dream. But when her son opens the front door and brings in a dead mouse, Mother goes to the porch—and she finds it covered in dead animals. (We see ex-possums, birds and other critters in the pile.)

When her husband tells Mother that “happiness is a choice,” Mother fantasizes about slapping him in the face. Mother slips on some fingerpaints and hurts her back.

Mother talks about her thirst and fascination for blood when she’s in a more doggy state of mind: “I am hair and blood and bone,” she says. “I am instinct and anger.” She kills and buries a rabbit (“Oh, blood!” she says) and shows some sudden antipathy for the family cat. When Her husband jokes about how nice it would be if the cat ceased to be, Mother comes up with a strange, stream-of-consciousness fantasy of how “maybe a chicken will grab him,” carry him to the higher echelons of the sky (as chickens often fly to), and drop the cat in a deep quarry, where construction machines “repeatedly run over its broken corpse.”

[Spoiler Warning] Ultimately, Mother—in a dog state, apparently—kills the family cat. (We see the corpse on the front porch as well.) When she off-handedly mentions this to her other mommy friends, a couple of others confess moments of pet neglect that motherhood foisted on them.

Crude or Profane Language

Obviously, the movie’s very title contains a profanity—though, as you might’ve guessed from what you know of the film so far, there’s a double entendre to the title. It refers both to a female dog (not a swear word) and to Mother’s angry state of being (a swear word).

However you parse that word, though, we’ve got plenty of others to contend with as well. We hear about 30 f-words (four of them uttered by a toddler at a public library), seven s-words and “h—,” “b–ch” and “p-ss.” God’s name is misused seven times.

Drug & Alcohol Content

Mother drinks, but seemingly not to the point of intoxication. She often has a glass of wine at lunch as she and her son eat macaroni and cheese. An evening out with her old grad school friends depicts alcohol all around the table, and Mother orders at least two cocktails. Wine and champagne appear to be available at a gallery show, and some of Mother’s artwork includes bottles of wine. There’s a reference to a “paint and sip” group, which likely alludes to painting and drinking wine.

Other Noteworthy Elements

Nightb–ch is, on some level, a body-horror film, and the camera takes great glee in watching Mother discover new dog-like elements on her body. In one scene, she lances what appears to be a boil on her lower back: White liquid oozes from the wound, and Mother starts fishing around in the boil with her finger—ultimately pulling a long string of hair—possibly a tail. She pulls at hair on her face and examines the fuzz sprouting in various places.

Mother talks about how birth is accompanied by blood and urine and excrement, and a birthing scene depicts a blood-stained sheet. When Mother takes a shower, menstrual blood runs down her legs and onto the shower floor; she tells her husband to pick up tampons at the grocery store, because her latest period promises to be a “doozy.”

Mother’s husband sits on a toilet while his son takes a bath in the same room. (We see nothing critical, but it’s obvious he was doing some business.) A child holds a handful of excrement. A pregnant woman mentions that she vomited after smelling the trash. We hear a reference to smelling a cat’s rear.

Conclusion

Nightb–ch is a good news, bad news sort of movie.

The good news: The film embraces motherhood as the truly incredible state of being it is—in all its wonder, its horror, its complexity, its irreplaceability.

At the beginning of the film, Mother seems to take on the role of a full-time, stay-at-home mom with reluctance, thinking of all the myriad things she misses, the myriad aspects of herself that she feels she must ignore.

And yes, Nightb—ch insists that Mother shouldn’t ignore those aspects: She returns to her art, most importantly, and reclaims some of her old, pre-motherhood verve. But at the same time, her old, artsy, grad-school friends feel, to her, rather shallow and pretentious.

Her new tribe consists of fellow moms—women who know the power and pain of that all-important job. A “weak state of being?” Hardly. No one is stronger than a mother, and no job demands more than motherhood. This is a movie that gets that.

Still, if the movie’s main point is to say, “Motherhood is awe-full and awful, and hey, dads, you could help more,” it probably could’ve said it without, y’know, all the dead animals and sex scenes and f-words.

Nightb–ch is just as problematic as its title suggests. Just like Mother’s description of birth, the film contains more than a little blood and waste. This is not a movie that (again, paraphrasing the movie itself) is filled with sunshine and baby powder. And while it may contain some truth and even beauty, it’s a beast of a watch all the same.