A mom goes to the dogs in ‘Nightbitch’
As Tammy Wynette once sang, sometimes it’s hard to be a woman. That iconic understatement might easily serve as the thesis statement for “Nightbitch,” the new horror-tinged offering from writer/director Marielle Heller.
Yet while Wynette was lamenting the hardships of staying loyal to a partner, Heller is more interested in the hardships of staying loyal to one’s self – and takes on a rarely aired perspective on an even more quintessential feminine experience.
We’re speaking, naturally, of Motherhood, considered a definitive part of female identity ever since there have been women. Cloaked in sacrosanct reverence due to its association with the traditional imperative to “preserve the species,” it’s often seen as a rite of passage that illuminates and reinforces the traditional role of women as “givers of life,” and usually characterized as demanding deep personal sacrifice — the sublimation of oneself for the sake of another (who, in the words of Heller’s protagonist, would “pee in your face without blinking”) in obedient servitude to the greater good.
Before you start clutching your pearls (“How DARE you suggest that being a mother is anything less than a blessing?!”), we’re not knocking motherhood; nor are we suggesting that children are life-sucking demons who exist only to torment us and disrupt every facet of our lives until we feel enslaved by them.
