The premise of Bitch sounds bad but the trailer seems much, much better: a harried mother with a cheating husband and nightmarish children is so worn down by her family that she becomes a literal bitch—a female dog.
Directed by Marianna Palka, Bitch is the kind of feminist satire that usually feels a little too on the nose, but in this case, looks like a dark take on the trope of a housewife losing her shit and becoming something else entirely. Ritter is particulary delightful as a smarmy idiot who’s shtupping his coworker and is so out of touch that he’s incapable of figuring out how to make his daughter lunch. We don’t see much of Palka in the trailer, most likely because part of the movie’s fun surprise is that she’s an unpredictable, snarling, crawling woman seemingly possessed by a dog, but for the premise alone, I’ll take it.
Speaking to Variety at Sundance earlier this year, Palka explained her reason for the movie’s title. “I think because there’s such a power in the word, and I think that the word actually means so much to so many people,” she said. “I think that it’s obviously sometimes misused as a word and a term. I always think there’s another way to talk about someone. If you want to call them that, you should call them something else. You could say that they’re being assertive.”
Nothing wrong with calling this movie Bitch, when it, in fact, is about a literal bitch, though I’m sure there will be one to five people who emerge from the shadows griping about how this movie undermines feminism, sets women back and is #actually more oppressive than anything else and didn’t our foremothers Gloria Steinem and the overall-clad women of the second wave yell until their throats were raw about the ways this word has oppressed women for centur-I’m so sorry, I’ll stop.
