In 2017, I saw the first movie that seemed to really capture my relationship with my mother. Whenever I talk to people about Lady Bird (2017), no matter their thoughts on the movie, seems to nod along and agree that the mother–daughter relationship was so accurate. Laura Metcalf’s character in Lady Bird makes mistakes and fights with her teenage daughter, even refusing to say goodbye to her at the airport. She is complicated and flawed, at times not displaying typical maternal traits. But she still loves her daughter, even if she can’t express it.
Since the late 2010s, the ‘imperfect’ mum has been experiencing a cultural reckoning. From horror movies like the Babadook (2014) and coming-of-age films like Lady Bird and Moonlight (2016), Western indie cinema is beginning to embrace the complexities of mother and child relationships. Elsewhere, memoirs like Crying in H Mart (2021) by Michelle Zauner grant readers space to mourn for a mother who may have criticised continuously but criticised out of unconditional love. However, these stories, bar the Babadook, tend to speak from the child’s perspective. Whilst they all deconstruct the realities of a child’s relationship with a mother, most don’t fully embrace the societal horror of a mother who doesn’t like mothering, of a mother who is monstrous.
Nightbitch (2021), a magical realist novel, centres on ‘The Mother’, a former artist, who, from taking on the large parenting burden of raising her son (who we only know as ‘the son’ or ‘the boy’) has begun to turn into a dog, also known as ‘Nightbitch’. Nightbitch dreams of killing, going feral and raising her son in the manner of a dog, including feeding him raw meat. Nightbitch yearns for her life before her son, when she was an artist, and resents other mothers, her husband, and her own child.
Nightbitch is a character who by all ‘societally appropriate’ measures we should cringe at: she longs to kill things, she doesn’t want to be a ‘good’ mother and even abandons her son to run in the streets for a night. Yet throughout the novel, I longed for Nightbitch to experience happiness and freedom. I felt like cheering when Nightbitch first goes feral, and again when she recruits other mothers to be involved in her ‘art’. She performs her lack of domesticity for the other mothers, not feeling bound by the rules she reckons with at the beginning of the story. Finally, in other words, Nightbitch experiences freedom.
The Lost Daughter (2021) won awards on the film circuit, including the award for Best Screenplay at the 2022 Spirit Awards. A psychological drama, it follows Olivia Coleman’s character Leda as she observes a young mother and her daughter, with this reminding her of her own failings as a mother.
Throughout the film, we see via flashbacks Lena’s younger self, played by Jesse Buckley, struggling in motherhood. She yells, she winces, and we see her in more pain and anger than we do joy. Eventually, we learn that as a young mother Leda abandoned her family. While she did return to raise her children, this absent period haunts her for the rest of the film, and more so because of how she felt during her absence. ‘I loved it’, Oliva Coleman’s character confesses when asked if she regretted leaving her children.
I didn't hate or resent Leda—neither her older nor younger version. If anything, the film made me feel irritated by any child seen on screen. When I finished the movie for the first time, I closed my laptop lid, stewing in my own solitude for a few minutes, feeling the need to call my mother. I chose not to, simply because I didn't know whether to express gratitude or to apologise.
I am quite close to my mum. We got closer when I moved further away in what was a very dramatised version of beginning my adult life. She didn’t love this move at the time. But it is now my third year out of home, and the longer I have spent away from her, the more I have reflected on every little shitty thing I did as a child. Especially when she was the only one there. I asked her for something when the shops were closed that I needed by the next day. I begged for a school excursion that cost her weekly paycheque. I sided with Dad on things when in hindsight he was the villain. She didn’t leave like Leda, nor did she turn into a bitch like Nightbitch. But I wouldn’t have blamed her if she did.
There is something so repulsive to our society about a bad mother, about someone who rejects what we understand a woman’s role to be. If the cis woman’s body is built to nurture, nourish, and nurse a child, what does this mean for womanhood if this is rejected? Even for the progressive populace, there is something so horrifying about a woman who not only resents motherhood but resents her own children. My skin always crawls when watching Toni Collette yell, ‘I never wanted to be your mother’ in Hereditary (2018), a film that presents allegorically the horrors that can occur when women sacrifice their families for their art and to retain their personhood.
Society has a way of punishing mothers who wish to stray from the norm. The Supreme Court of the United States, for one, has just overturned Roe v. Wade. But such punishment is not just meted out by conservative Americans. Not all states in Australia, for instance, have a safe access zone law for abortion clinics to protect people with uteruses from protesters. Further, during her time as Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard oversaw a cut to single mother Centrelink payments. I felt this decision directly, witnessing how this policy limited my mum’s ability to raise her children financially and emotionally. Even, it seems, if we have a female Prime Minister, our society still punishes mothers who do not fit into the mould of what we demand them to be.
Perhaps that is why the monstrous mother has only existed in horror movies, in magical realist novels, and in psychological indie films. Maybe this is why daytime television still insists on airing reruns of The Brady Bunch. A rejection of traditional motherhood is horrifying to us: it cannot be represented in the mainstream family movie that is easily consumed by the masses. It is only available for us to explore in settings we won’t mistake for real life. Yet that is what makes the premise of a novel like Nightbitch so satisfying to consume: we can escape vicariously through the protagonist’s rabid transformation.
Personally, I don’t believe the world is ready to reckon with the reality of motherhood outside of the horror, indie or magical realist genres. But I’m not even sure I want it to leave these genres. Motherhood in today’s world, plagued by a lack of government support, the climate crisis that could cut your and your child’s life short, and the constant fear of your child getting sick, is a horror. It should be depicted as such.
Chelsea Daniel is a freelance writer focusing on all things cultural and screen. Their works have been published in the likes of Farrago, Gem Zine and Radio Fodder, and they were a member of the inaugural Parliament Express program. She can often be found desperately scouring Melbourne for the perfect bagel.