NIGHTBITCH is in the Wild. Is it Good?
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This is the Book Riot Podcast. I'm Rebecca Shinsky, joined by Book Riot's Managing Editor Vanessa Diaz today. This is a special holiday drop-in episode because the adaptation of Night Bitch, based on Rachel Yoder's 2021 novel of the same name, which had a very limited run in theaters, has hit streaming. It's available on Hulu now.

And we are here to talk about it. Vanessa, thank you for going on this journey with me. This was a hilarious thing to tell my parents. Hey, guys, I'm going to go to my room to watch a movie for work. And it was like the holidays. And I'm like, what's it called? I'm like...

Don't worry about it. What is it? Don't worry. It's fine. It's fine. Great holiday watch. Yeah, it's an interesting choice that they dropped this onto streaming right after Christmas. But lots of us are home. We're looking for things to stream. And I have to tell you, I am so grateful that you have become my intrepid partner in probably ill-advised movie adaptations. Yeah.

I'm happy to serve in this role. Yeah. For those of you who did not have the pleasure of listening this summer, Vanessa went to see It Ends With Us so that we could talk about that. That episode is back in the feed. Maybe we'll put a link to that in the show notes as well because It Ends With Us hit Netflix just before the holidays. So if you're looking for entertainment,

You have some choices. Let's take a quick, we'll take a quick break for our first sponsor and then we'll get into it. Okay, so for the unfamiliar, or maybe if you've read the book, but you need a refresher. Night Bitch, as I said, is based on Rachel Yoder's 2021 novel of the same name. It is about a woman who has quit her job in the art world to be a stay at home mother to her toddler, her child who's a toddler now.

In the book, we know her only as mother. The child is known as baby. Her husband is known as husband. This is a device that really serves to anchor them in how they are their roles more than they are their individual selves at this point in their lives. Husband travels during the week. So mother is alone with baby Monday through Friday afternoon, and she's losing it.

So she starts to turn into a dog at night, maybe, sort of.

Let's start there. I read the book last month. Vanessa, you made it about halfway through and we were talking before we started recording here that I actually think that's a boon for us that you have not finished the book because as we get later into the show and we'll get into some spoilers, the movie ends very differently than the book ends. But let's talk a little bit about the book and about these question marks folks are hearing in our voices for maybe she turns into a dog.

Yeah, honestly, I don't even know that it was all the way half. I think I probably made it like a third of the way through. Not because it wasn't. It's just life intervened. So I just sort of, okay, well, you know what? I'm just going to stop all in my head and just watch the film. And was immediately... I'm not even sure where I want to start. Like, you know, if I toss the book aside and just go straight into the movie, what I do think it did really well was sort of sink you into that

Oh my gosh, this is so much harder than I thought it was going to be space for motherhood, which I have a lot of respect for. Like I say this very respectfully, but that whole like first 15, 20 minutes of the movie is my actual nightmare. And that is not, you know, again, super co-sign anybody who wants to be a parent. If you want to be a parent, you should be a parent. Much respect to all parents, but like they really drilled down into that. I love my child, but what have I done? Yeah.

Yeah, that's... Yeah. You want to help me out here on some early thoughts? Yeah, there's these, you know, she's in the book, we get her narration about how repetitive the days are. But I agree. I think the movie really brings that aspect to life that we see her like standing in the kitchen making the exact same breakfast every day. And it's this montage scene of like,

Her outfit changes, but the look on her face stays the same. And it's the same hash browns going into the same pan. Oh, the hash brown super cuts. Yes. And that device comes up a couple of times through the film where we see how repetitive life with a toddler is. And I'm also not a parent. I think we both have lots of parents in our lives. We've lots of nieces and nephews and we've heard stories.

that this is what life with a young kid at home is like. They say the days are long, but the years are short. And I thought both the book and the film really captured what it is that makes those days feel so long. And that mother has no time for herself. It happens in both the book and the movie that she doesn't really get to shower during the week. And

And husband comes home and she's taking her first shower in four days and he can't cope with the baby by himself for those like 15 minutes without coming in to ask her several questions about like, why is there no milk? Where do we keep the whatever? And that this all adds to her feeling that that she's become something feral, that she's something very animal and is just in this kind of primal experience in her body. And then it

And then it kind of tilts into body horror where it's more protracted in the book. She starts to notice that her teeth are maybe getting longer and pointier. She shows her husband and he agrees, but also like doesn't really have an opinion about the fact that this is happening. She gets this maybe the best analogy is like very large cysts.

at the base of her spine, that she goes to Lance and a bunch of fur pops out. It's like a tail. Oh, that scene. The way it's rendered in the film, I just saw the substance recently. And I was like, oh, this feels adjacent to the substance and to some of the stuff that's happening there. So the

A tail pops out. Her sense of smell gets really sharpened. And she's walking through the grocery store, like sniffing a block of cheese and noting all of the little undertones of scent in it. She can't stop eating raw meat.

becomes obsessed with like buying steak. It's really, really graphic and very visceral throughout the book. How did you pick up on that? Or how did you feel about how that was rendered in the film having maybe not made it all the way into those details in the book? Yeah, the thing that I went in a little bit cautious of, and this is a, I don't know if it's a critique so much as like a

concern I often have with books that are really, really not cerebral, but like where the monologue is internal. I don't always feel like that gets translated well into film because it's hard unless you're like literally having the person just narrate out loud the whole time. They, what I do think the film, at least from what I gathered was doing pretty well was kind of sneaking those little bits in. And then again, through the use of just like this repetitive imagery of,

driving home some of the things that I would have gotten, I think, in the book through that monologue. So like there was that. But the way that the dog stuff came about in the film, and especially because I haven't finished the book yet,

I don't know that it felt seamless and I don't know that it's supposed to, but it, it, I don't know. I feel like the payoff, we kind of just went from like one place to the other and yeah, she was developing some of the symptoms, you know, she notices that she's got like extra nipples and then yes, there's like the Lansing scene, but,

I don't know if I'm just not cool enough to grasp this kind of horror, but I didn't. I felt like I needed more time or like I needed to, again, hear more of her monologue to kind of arrive at the place where it kind of just seems like she accepted it. And I don't know if this is part of the book or not, but there wasn't a whole lot of meditation. I'm like, this is weird. She mentioned it a little bit to the husband, but again, they seem to move past it pretty quickly.

She does spend a little more time in the is this real what's happening space in the book, which when I read it, I was thinking how on earth are they going to translate this device to the screen? Because it's just a flavor of weirdness. I think that works when you're living in your own imagination, picturing like,

Is this actually happening or does she just feel like she's not a person? Does she just feel like an animal? Is she just looking for some way to dissociate from her daily existence? Because you get scenes in the book like at night, she goes out onto her front porch and there are these three dogs standing in the front yard that, you know, run up to her. They tear her clothes off. She transforms into a dog and then she's running with the pack.

And, you know, they're like killing the squirrels in the neighborhood. Then she later bumps into some of the mommies from the mommies and me library group and realizes that like one of the mommies strawberry shampoo smells exactly like one of the dogs who was visiting her. And she's she has this like, oh, are we all doing this? Is this how we're all coping?

But yeah, one of the key differences is that in the book, those mommies, like she falls in with this group of mommies. They have this MLM. It's like an herbal tea situation. Did you get that far? I don't think I did. Okay.

Where they like invite her to their party. They're talking about all of the magical blends. And there is basically like a mommy's little helper herb blend that you're kind of like, are they just getting stoned to cope with their days?

She's very weirded out by it. But she does like she wants this company. And there's this central tension in the book between like she feels very alone because she feels like I had this career as an artist. I can't relate to these other stay at home moms who like I'm a mess. They're all put together. They seem to love this stay at home mom life. And I am discovering this is not for me. And she, you know, kind of.

agrees to hang out with them, agrees to go to these hangs and the little tea parties. And maybe she's going to take their herbs. Maybe she's not. But the whole time she's feeling like alienated, but also this real desire to find community. And I felt like in the book, or sorry, in the movie, she just sort of slides right in to that group. And

it's not, I mean, they don't do the herbal tea MLM thing at all. You don't see that the other women are really suffering. She's the only one who seems to be having a hard time. And I would argue that she doesn't even, well, she does slide in, but she actually doesn't slide in for quite some time. Like there is really the beginning of it. I feel like she, for the most part, isn't really gelling with the moms much. She seems to kind of find them. I don't know if it's just, she's finding them silly or not, or if that's just the way that I was interpreting it, but

You know, they're constantly coming up to her at the library. So you're like, oh, do you do wine and sip? Do you do this? Do you do that? And she bows out of all that stuff. And then it kind of just feels like towards the end, which again, I could see why that might happen where she finally is like, okay, no, I actually do need some community. Like, let me just give these moms a chance. And then they all kind of are like, we're all weird too. And it's fine. There is not necessarily that same thing.

I didn't get the impression that even the questioning of like, wait, is this how we're all getting by? Is this what we're all are we all doing this feral dog thing? Like, I didn't get that impression at all. Yeah, it's it is much darker. And the idea that maybe they're all suffering and looking for some kind of escape comes across, I think, much more clearly in the book. So maybe let's jump back back up to like, first, what genre is this movie? Yeah.

Again, was trying to explain to my parents what I was going to be watching. And I was like, ah, I finally just looked it up. And I guess I keep seeing people calling it like a satire horror comedy. And sure, I...

I don't know. I don't know that it is quite comedy enough for me to call it a horror comedy. I'm a little bit stuck on how to classify this film in a way that would make it make sense to like a person where I'm like, okay, like you're gonna you're gonna expect a certain flavor by what I give you. I don't know that anything I can describe is going to give you this flavor of movie.

Yeah, I felt like the book is pretty solidly satire. Yes, the book is. It's very sharp. You feel Yoder's rage on basically every page of like, this is the situation that we have put women in. And that really got softened in the film. I think it makes...

it more palatable. Like it's, it probably makes it more to be cynical about it. It makes it more marketable that she's not just a hundred percent miserable about the idea of being a mother. Like, how are you going to go get the stay at home moms who like being a stay at home mom to see this movie? If it's just anti stay at home mom, or like maybe they're trying not to get picketed by right wing conservatives, the, you know, pro family stuff. Um, Yoder's, you know, she is a mother. She's writing from that place. She's not anti-family. Um,

by any stretch. But the book very solidly lands with like, we've got to do something different here. This is untenable. That like the only solution to manage life at home with your child is to either actually run feral at night or to at least play some kind of game where like in both the book and the film, mother...

involves Baby in this idea that they are dogs. And, you know, they run around and they bark and they eat some of their food out of dog bowls. Baby gets really into it. Toddlers do weird stuff. So he wants a collar and she gets him one. In the book...

She gets him a dog crate to sleep in because one of the recurring themes is she has no time to herself, no space where there's not another being connected to her body. And at night, putting him to bed is miserable. She made the mistake of letting him sleep in her bed for too long and he won't go to sleep. So she's just like constantly begging him to please go to sleep. And she's just like, let's try.

I didn't see. So she gets a crate. She puts it in the living room and she discovers that when she tells baby that it's time for doggy to go to bed, doggy goes into the dog crate. He falls right to sleep. And that means she gets to go to sleep. They translated this into it's just a dog bed on the floor of the bedroom.

in the movie. And I did read an interview or a profile. Emily Nussbaum did a great profile for the New Yorker of Mariel Heller, who wrote and directed the film. And she was like, you know, in the era of Trump, we thought that kids in crates was a little too close to kids in cages. Yeah.

Yeah, I'm gonna give you that one. Which I can see, but I do think there's also a case for it. Like that visual of this is what we've come to. Like this is how desperate this woman is. And I guess that's my core feeling is that the desperation does not come across as sharply in the movie as it needs to. Yeah, I would almost say that it isn't. I mean, it is desperation, but it's also just like ennui. And I...

Yeah, like, just looking at the way that it unfolds, I think there was always going to be a huge challenge around, I guess, yeah, putting the visceral, feral qualities of what it might be like to just suddenly find yourself in a dog's body on screen. Yeah.

Because the scenes where she's kind of acting it out and doing the, you know, where she walks out on two feet and then like slowly gets onto all fours and is like scratched around. I didn't, there was no way for me to look at that except to laugh. Like, and maybe that's the point, but it didn't give me feral so much as a little like, are we, are we okay? And you know, that's also part of it too, but it kind of came across as silly. And then, yeah, they suddenly just show like a dog running through the streets, but it's,

I don't know. It could just be because the medium was never going to be able to do this, but I think I could have gotten past it in my imagination. And then, and cause if you, again, you can just sort of imagine how it would happen. Whereas this particular, uh,

All the montages where she's, you know, the implications that she's out becoming a dog at night were A, either not fully fleshed out. You're kind of getting it more as nightmares where you're asking, like, is this happening? Is it not? And then the parts where I did see it on screen felt a little like, you know, Jacob turning into the wolf in Twilight. Like, it was just hard for me to take it as serious as...

Yeah, because the message behind it is clear. And I completely am down with that, that the way that we treat motherhood in this country in particular, and just societally at large is so untenable. And there's so much that's unfair about it. And all that we're putting like that part is the one the fact that they wanted to convey that message is clear to me.

But the way that they went about it. And again, my question, I guess, is like, is this just a limitation of like being able to put this onto a screen? Like, was there no other way to do it? Maybe I'm not giving them enough credit, but I wasn't able to get that like, punch from the film in a way that I think the book might have given me. I agree. I think the behaviors that Rachel Yoder writes as like really primal and animalistic come off as kind of

like whimsical in the film or like silly. And one of the ways that the device really doesn't work on film is like, this is a place where it makes it a lot easier to see where the plot holes or the believability might be. Like, one of the things that's consistent between the book and the movie is that she does, you know, she's her teeth are getting longer, she grows this tail, she thinks that now she has eight nipples. And she's telling husband a

about all of these things. And he kind of laughs it off. But then there are scenes where like one of the things that she kind of likes about being in this more animalistic version of herself is they're having great sex. And, you know, it's, you know, so he is seeing her naked. And in the film, it's very like he's looking at her standing in the shower and he's not going to notice if she actually has eight nipples. Yep.

So it just, I don't know, it really brings it the lie forward a little bit more of like, this must be something that's more happening in her head, where the book invites you to live in the space of like, but maybe she actually is turning into a dog at night. Yeah, this is the part where I kind of kept getting a little bit lost. It's like everybody was either just completely buying into the fact that what we were saying was true in a way that didn't feel realistic. Yeah.

or something else. And I couldn't. Like it all started, we would get to some of these places. And then the payoff after I was just like, I don't know, this is really hard to do on film. Yeah. So let's take a break there. And when we come back, we will get into spoiler territory.

Okay, so here is your spoiler alert, folks. If you have not finished the book or seen the movie and you don't want to know the like the big differences in the big details, you should skip out now. But right before we skip out, Vanessa, should people see this movie?

I feel really terrible about this, but I kind of don't. I really... Yeah. I wanted to enjoy this so, so much because I've heard such phenomenal things about this book. And I just walked away, especially at the ending, which I'm really, really interested to hear how it actually ends. Because I just was like, okay. Okay.

And for those reasons, I I'm just not really digging the film. Yeah, I agree. Read the book for sure. It reads like a house on fire. I read it like on one flight and had a great time. Also, it's fun to sit in an airport holding a paperback that says night bitch on it. No one will talk to you. Excellent. Yeah.

All right. So here we go entering spoiler territory. So among, you know, some of the differences we've already talked about that the way the mommy group lands in her life is really different. The biggest difference in between the book and the movie is the ending. So in the book, mother

has tapped into this primal part of herself. She needs to start creating art again. And the way that it ends is that we see that she has developed a performance art piece that has become like the talk of the art world where she kills a live rabbit and

on stage and like chases her son through the forest. And it's become this thing like people go to see can they is she actually going to do this? Can she tolerate it? And like the piece is called Night Bitch. And everyone knows that it's this stand in for motherhood. And so now she has

kind of found integration of her mother self and her dog primal self by coming back to the thing that she loves. She's creating art and she is expressing like all of this desperation and the frustration and like issuing her critique about what contemporary America does to mothers. It's revolutionary. Like the thing that this woman and her art are saying is that we've got to do something different. And you end the book feeling like,

Rachel Yoder is not anti-family. Rachel Yoder is not anti-mother. Rachel Yoder is anti the way we do this in the West, or especially the way that we do it in America, that mothers need support. Tell me how the movie ends.

I know that there's another movie or show that has done a version of what I'm about to describe and it has been kicking me that I can't think of it because it's basically her... I mean, she has like a talk with her husband and then like does go essentially back to making art. But it is this... Like she basically does an installation. There is none of this performance piece. It's essentially...

after having had like a heart to heart again, this is the part where I was talking about with the moms. It feels like this is the first time she finally sits down and decides she wants to be friends with the other moms in this mommy group. They sit down, have a discussion about all the ways in which they feel like terrible women too, for like the way they get through the day. And then she opens up this art show where she's done paintings of like each of these moms. There is this sort of, haha, like piece in the center. That's like a bunch of taxidermied animals that of course we will recognize and

from the stuff that's happened throughout the course of the film and all of a sudden this like bouquet of animal corpses was just waiting on her doorstep from the thing she did the night before but and then everybody's like yes you can have it all and it's great and it's gonna be different from now on so her and the husband are like happy off at the sunset and then the movie ends with her having another kid and it's a girl and it's a girl

And where it's in the middle of like the birth, you know, this is when it ends. She's like sitting there literally pushing down in the middle of labor. And she's giving this, I think what otherwise would have been like an interesting monologue about how motherhood and childbirth is like a violent act, etc, etc. And then like, boom, but okay. Yeah. Yeah. So that moment where she is like in that kind of raw animal state, and she's giving birth to another child, and they say,

It's a girl. That was the moment that I felt the movie was the most like a horror movie. Like, oh, I think we're supposed to walk away from this ending with a maybe we can all work it out or like it's all worth it. Like, look, yeah, she was desperate and miserable. But having a baby is so worth it that she's going to go back to the well and do that again. And maybe she and husband will be better at it this time around. And I think we should mention Scoot McNary as husband is like

as good as anybody can be. Yes, absolutely. And I think Amy Adams also. Oh, I think she did great with what she had. Her performance is way better than the material she was given. Yes. But I, I, I don't think the, that the it's a girl is supposed to fill us with dread, but it definitely filled me with dread of like, oh, she's given birth to a girl who now might enter into the world and have this same kind of experience. Yeah.

I was mad. Like, is this seriously? Yeah, I was not like I the dissonance in particular, just to go back to the point you just made of like the fact that I think this was supposed to be like, and this is great. Whereas for me, I was like, Oh, no, I that disconnect felt funny to me. I was like, I don't think like you said that this is maybe supposed to fill me with the dread that I'm feeling, but I do feel dread and I can't tell I guess how that's supposed to be interpreted. But especially now knowing what the ending really was supposed to be.

Again, it's just sort of feels like we got to the like, everything's gonna be fine. It's like in a way that a person who has been out of the art world for this long, etc. And it kind of just feels like it gets slapped into existence. And everyone's like, this is a raging success. I'm like, okay, cool. Like, in what way? I don't, I don't know. I, again, my issue, I think, is with payoff.

And I am not entirely sure that I buy the ending in the way that it was presented to me. Yeah, I felt like in the book, Yoder is saying that freedom or at least relief from these circumstances comes from embracing your feral nature and accessing some kind of wildness. She has to let herself become ferocious in order to get...

you know, to stand up for herself functionally and to get any relief from these desperate circumstances. And the movie really leans closer to like being in favor of domestication that like now she's found the right container for her wildness so she can have another baby. She can go back and do the same thing again. And there's like

I thought there was a lot of audience service or like wish fulfillment. We get to see the husband do this big apology. And if I had only known and I want to be here with you and it's very, it just felt very canned and predictable to me, but in a very unrealistic way, like it's,

If the big dispute that is maybe going to break up your marriage and your family is over the division of labor with parenting, you're not going to like sit down and have one heart to heart and it's magically better. Correct. That is, I think, where I was the most just like, and then again, it's like, oh, and not only is it how we've completely figured it out, you're not going to have all this time to create all this art and you're going to have this like show that you're going to mash together and like everything is fine. It just felt so quick and in a way that

anybody who has ever known a single parent who has been dealing with even a quarter of these issues. It's like, this is a big conversation that requires a lot of discussion at bare minimum. And that if the labor wasn't being divided well to begin with, it is not my experience that the partner then is just like, you're right. Do you want to make an art show? Yeah, I really do. Like, great. Let's have another kid. Yeah. It very much felt like you said that it wasn't so much about

I went in with this very, very like wild idea of what the movie was going to be because of the way that the book had been described to me. And so frankly, because horror has been a thing that I've only sort of dipping my toes again into in the last few years, I kind of went in and like with my shoulders up by my ears, like, okay, here we go. Like, let's see how feral this gets. And it very much, like you said, felt like we took all of those feral instincts and all of these big like

Yeah, the big energy that I was expecting and kind of just said, okay, well, there is a version in which you could package this for this regular domestic life and still have a little bit of both. And I don't know that that is the vibe that I understood the book was like nailing at. Yeah. So the ending again felt very almost pat like, yeah.

Yeah, pat is a good word for it. Another big change between the book and the movie. And I got some messages when I talked about Night Bitch on Instagram from folks who were like, man, that book should come with a warning that the cat dies and in a really graphic way. So the family has this cat that is, it seems like a totally fine cat. But mother is constantly annoyed by the cat because it's like one more creature that needs things from her. In the book,

Mother kills the cat while mother is in her human form. Oh, like, mm hmm. Stumbles over something in the kitchen. Cat is right under her feet. And she has this like eruption of like a hurrah, like a big rage. Kills the cat and then has to explain to baby that the cat has died. You know? Yeah. They bury the cat in the backyard. Husband comes home from his week away. And she's like,

I don't know what happened. Something attacked it. The cat died. And he's like, the cat died and you didn't even call me. You know. In the movie, she opens the front door one day and the cat is dead on her stoop. And it's implied that she killed the cat while she was in her dog form. Which is... I understand why they didn't want to show a human killing a cat on...

on screen. But it's one more way that like the book really shows the state that she's in and the violence that she like the ends that she's been pushed to. So that happened. Oh, wow. I mean, there's a way to convey I'm thinking of Yellow Jackets and the scene with the bunny. Like there's a way to convey that this was about to happen without necessarily showing it on screen. But you can like pan away at the last second. Here I am giving like cinematic notes as though I have any idea what I'm talking about.

You know, Yellow Jackets, I think, is actually a great comparison, though, because that's another piece of media. Yes. Like that particular piece of media is one that like I was, oh, man, I went in for sure thinking, oh, my gosh, don't get me wrong. Some awful stuff happens, but they really expertly do it in a way where, like,

So much of it is more just the way you interpret or like the, yeah, I mean, I'm sure people know that if not, you know, warning, but it's catalyzm. So you're watching the two events in question in a lot of Yellow Jackets are just perfectly separated enough where like, you know that someone is about to get the, you know, whatever. And that happens in a way. And then later you're just presented like a platter of meat. So you get the connection and you're still like, oh, and you have this visceral reaction, but they didn't actually show that.

Like the awful thing happening in this. I think there's a way to do stuff like that, that this for a book and movie that were ostensibly so much about female rage. And again, this like primal out of body experience, it feels so tamped down for reasons of like, I get not wanting to show a woman, you know, killing a cat on screen, but there is a way I think it could have been done that still conveyed those big visceral moments that didn't necessarily have to go all the way graphic. Yeah.

That's such a great point. I would love to see another pass at this adaptation in the hands of the Yellow Jackets showrunners. Yeah, because they can go there, right? I mean, like you, Rebecca put me onto this show. It goes there. It goes all kinds of there, there and back many times. But you don't actually really have to watch most of the terrible stuff happen. It's just that the scenes are spliced together in just perfect enough a way where you get that the awful thing just happened and then your stomach is turning, but you didn't watch it.

Yeah, there's a way to do it. And I think actually I'm just going to latch onto your phrase that it goes there because the book goes there in so many ways. We are in her body. We're in her daily experience. We're in that monotony. We are in the rage of you finally sat down after a whole week with this baby and husband is supposed to be giving baby a bath and husband like needs help with five things. And can you please put the towel in the dryer so it's warm for baby? And she's like, I

I do this by myself every day while you're gone. Get it together. And the movie just passes up almost every opportunity to actually go there. The book feels like this rallying cry to me. You could kind of imagine gangs of women marching through the streets, waving copies of Night Bitch, being like, we have to do something. It has to get better. And the movie...

fundamentally accepts the way that things are and sends her back in. Oh my gosh, yes. That...

Which I'll just steal a line from Emily Nussbaum's piece with Marielle Heller, which it turns out that part of the reason that the ending was changed is that Marielle Heller had an experience having her first child where she wasn't sure she wanted to have a second one and then decided to. So that informed it. But also executives gave notes that they wanted the ending to have a more clear cut point and

which feels to me like a note that only a man could give on this movie. Yeah.

That's not a good taste in my mouth. Yeah, but that's sort of that combination of Heller wrote her own experience into the, you know, change the way that Yoder had ended the book. And Rachel Yoder has said on the record that she's happy with the film and she wanted it to be its own different version of the story. But also like, what else are you going to say? Yeah, this one writes that despite its flashes of rage, it was a hetero optimist movie in a hetero pessimist age.

Ooh, clap that one. Yeah. This is why Emily Nussbaum gets to be the New Yorker's film critic. Absolutely. That's, I think, fundamentally it. That the book is like, there's a problem here. Yeah. And the film acknowledges that maybe things aren't perfect, but doesn't go there at all.

Oh, yeah, that's that's a perfect way to put that because that is from the beginning. I did have much higher hopes because again, it felt like some of the filming like we talked about like the super cuts of her just wearing the same kind of clothes, you know, different clothes, same expression, putting that same little what we all know to be the Trader Joe's hash brown patty into that pan over and over again. I was starting to okay, this is the build up this they're going to put all of the like monotony and like the difficulty in this and then it's going to get really, really intense.

You know, into the thick of it at the end, and I didn't feel like we got there. And that description you just gave really drives home what I think are ultimately the problems with it, because I just didn't walk away feeling as ragey about it as I thought it was going to. It felt much more, again, kind of tamped down in a way that I don't think was the actual message of the book insofar as I can tell.

Yeah, I think you're supposed to walk away from the book being like, I am going to call Bernie Sanders and we're going to get, you know, universal maternity leave. We're going to get daycare. We're going to get support for parents. We're going to get a child tax credit. We're going to be in the streets until we get these things. And it's political. The book is just deeply political in that way that the personal experience.

is political and i felt like the movie sanded off all the sharp edges or um all the sharp teeth maybe that the book yes there you go because very much was just like if you join a mommy group and you talk to your husband one time you're gonna be able to do this again and it's gonna be great and i don't do now let me say do some people do that yes like there's plenty of people that decide to have more children even though the first one was hard for all these reasons like maybe this is a realistic portrayal to a lot of women out there and that is valid but

for the message of the film to have been like, again, there is something fundamentally wrong with the way that we are going about this. We are draining all of women's life force by forcing them to do like the impossible, um,

And then for it to just, again, at the end feels very like tied up in what feel like very easy, quick solutions didn't get to the meat of it for me in a way that and again, it's not necessarily due to the act. Like I loved the acting. I thought so much like the cast itself was great, but it just didn't. Yeah, the rage that I expected to, I think I've said this, but like walk away with is very much just like, okay, fine.

That was yeah, I kind of wish that I could like time machine myself and watch the movie without having read the book. Yeah, because I've seen some I've tried to avoid reviews and headlines for the most part. But I've seen some coverage that makes me pretty sure that the person writing about the movie had not read the book where they're like, this is it's fun. Like it tap. It's fun. But it's also angry. It taps into some of these feelings, but it's not too dark. Amy Adams, it does give a very solid response.

performance. And I think maybe there's a world where you could just see the movie in a vacuum and have a good enough time. But as an adaptation of the novel, I think it pretty much fails. Yeah. Again, I also maybe wish I would have just not picked up the book at all because they did do part of it. And even only having done, again, what I think is maybe like a third, maybe a teeny bit more than that

i had enough of a flavor established that that is what made the film feel unsatisfactory and i did go back after the fact just to read a couple of things you know for research wanting to know how it some of it differed and i i would tend to agree that the people who were giving it be like this is fun etc may not have read the book either because it doesn't take too much of that text to realize that the tone of it was going to be very different than what we got in the movie

All right. Well, that's Night Bitch, written and directed by Marielle Heller, adapted from Rachel Yoder's novel. We endorse the novel, maybe not so much the film. Thanks for hanging with me, Vanessa. Anytime.