Nightbitch
Nightbitch
A woman, thrown into the stay-at-home routine of raising a toddler in the suburbs, slowly embraces the feral power deeply rooted in motherhood, as she becomes increasingly aware of the bizarre and undeniable signs that she may be turning into a dog.
CrossCutCritic reviewedMay 1, 2025
The Wild God of Motherhood
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Somewhere between a kitchen sink and a dog bowl, something sacred happens.
Amy Adams plays a woman — unnamed, unmoored — raising a child in the soft apocalypse of domestic life. She makes lunches. She folds laundry. She smiles through clenched teeth.
And then one day, she starts growing hair.
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This isn’t body horror.
It’s soul honesty.
Nightbitch isn’t asking if she’s turning into a dog.
It’s asking if she was ever allowed to be human.
Because when you silence the howl long enough,
eventually it finds a way out.
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There’s nothing tidy about this movie.
Not the mood.
Not the metaphors.
Not the woman herself.
And that’s the point.
This is the psalm no one wanted to write —
the one with milk stains and claw marks,
the one where God is silent
and the only prayer is breathing through another sleepless night.
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Adams doesn’t play the woman as crazy.
She plays her as cracked open.
As someone whose longing is bigger than the box she’s been put in.
And when she starts to run — literally, ferally —
you don’t judge her.
You envy her.
You realize: she’s not losing her mind.
She’s finding her body.
She’s finding the part of her that was never housebroken.
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There’s a scene with a deer.
There’s another with blood.
There’s a moment of embrace that feels too animal to be called love and too holy to be anything else.
That’s where Nightbitch howls the loudest:
You were made for more than coping.
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And here — hidden under the fangs and fur — is the cross.
Not the one from the church bulletin.
Not the polished one hanging around someone else’s neck.
But the real one:
the one you carry in your spine when no one sees you,
the one you drag across tiled floors in the middle of the night,
the one that bleeds you slowly
as you learn how to mother without losing yourself.
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Nightbitch is strange.
But so is God.
And maybe that’s the mercy —
that even when we become unrecognizable,
even when we grow wild with grief,
even when we say things we’re not supposed to say
and feel things we’re not supposed to feel —
the Spirit stays.
Not to tame us.
To run with us.