The Biggest Differences Between The Film 'Nightbitch' And The Book
As Nightbitch can attest, there is a voracious appetite in the cultural zeitgeist for projects depicting the dark ferality of motherhood. A case in point is the upcoming adaptation of Rachel Yoder's bestselling 2021 novel of the same name, which stars Amy Adams as the titular Mother.
For the uninitiated, Nightbitch tells the story of stay-at-home mum, Mother (Adams), whose name we tellingly never learn, as she becomes convinced that she's becoming a dog. Once an artist, Mother stops working to focus on raising her son, which renders her destabilised by the smothered domesticity of her new child-rearing life. What ensues is a satirical dark comedy that Yoder herself admitted to writing after wanting to write a book that would 'bear witness' to the intense experience of new motherhood, which she felt was often unseen and unwitnessed.
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The book — and the film — perfectly tell the story of how motherhood has the power to strip you of your entire identity, simultaneously providing you with purpose while also stripping you of it. How can something so sweet feel so destructive?
Of course, as with most adaptations, there are differences between the bestselling book and the film, though. These are all of the major points of differentiation between the book and the film (both, however, are deserving of a read and a watch).
That cat scene is toned down in the book
One of the most punctuating moments in the book happens when Mother feeds the family cat its food and, as she begins to prepare other food, the cat hovers behind her. Being flooded with an almost instantaneous rush of fury, Mother once again turns into a dog and, well, you can imagine what a dog might do to a cat if it had the chance. Needless to say that Mother's son then walks into the kitchen to find his mum's face covered in blood, hovering above a dead cat.
The scene in the film, however, is rather appropriately toned down. Instead, in the film, Mother offers up the family's cat as a sacrifice while in dog form. One evening, Nightbitch walks into her garden, where a handful of the neighbourhood's dogs have assembled a sacrificial line-up of dead rodents. Frustrated by her cat (the way that she is in the book), Nightbitch decides to offer her up to the pile, lunging toward the cat before the film returns to Mother, who’s then back in human form and lying in bed.
This change-up was entirely intentional, as the film's director Marielle Heller, admitted in a recent interview. 'There is something very different about actually physically seeing something than imagining it in your head,' Heller told USA TODAY. 'I talked to Rachel Yoder about it and I said, "I think we need to kill the cat from her dog form." And her response was, "You're totally right; that is the right call. I don't think anybody could handle physically seeing that."'
The film's ending is different to the book's
Given that Yoder's book exists in the magical realism realm, it was understandable that the novel finished on an ethereal note. At the end of the book, Mother ends up staging a performance art show at a local theatre where she morphs into her Nightbitch alter ego and begins to chase audience members through a hallucinated forest before killing a rabbit on stage and serving it up to her son.
Needless to say that this twist didn't quite make the cut for Hollywood executives, who decided that the movie adaptation ought to finish a more well-rounded, clearer cut point. Instead, in the film, Mother hosts a performance art show at a local gallery featuring paintings and sculptures of women and dogs during which she reunites with her husband before their family of three start playing in a bedroom that becomes a forest. Mother then, before the film finishes, gives birth to a baby girl with an animalistic scream.
The book and the film have different intentions
Having not written anything for two years, Yoder wrote Nightbitch after having a baby and feeling angry at the way her life — and the way she felt about it — had so dramatically graduated. She initially thought the book was 'to and for her husband' but it became clear while she was writing it that it was a book written to and for other mothers who may have also experienced the unpredictable ferality of motherhood.
Critics of the film have bemoaned the fact that it softened the sharp edges that exist within the novel, but Yoder has insisted that she didn't set out to make a 'one-to-one translation'. 'The goal became to digest her book, get to know it as deeply as I could, let it intermingle with my own life and then create out of that process,' Heller said. 'It's much more of a morphing into something new.'
Nightbitch is out in UK cinemas now.
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