Image - Riverstone Pictures

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The jump cuts of this montage happen just fast enough that we don't quite get time to process them. We observe 'mother' playing with her child, cooking meals, going to the playground. These images are slight variations of one another, each representing a moment in time of a day that is highly repetitious: the same knob of butter in the pan, the same hash browns, the same building blocks and toys, etc. The sequence cuts quickly, in a discombobulating manner, making us feel anxious, perhaps even agitated by the edit and jump cuts. this in contrast with the seemingly mundane and boring content of the scene.

The close up on her face and eyes, passively staring, but we sense the thunder brewing beneath the surface.

The time-image

In classical cinema (Cinema 1), time is structured by action: a character sees, reacts, and moves forward in a cause-and-effect sequence. However, in this scene the actions remain the same (cooking, playing, going out), but they are fragmented into micro-variations. The editing breaks the sensory-motor connection: rather than movement logically progressing, time folds back on itself, creating a closed circuit of repetition.

This repetition doesn’t create meaning through progression (as in classical cinema) but through accumulation and difference. This aligns with Deleuze’s breakdown of the action-image, where characters cease to act with agency and instead become trapped in time—passive observers of their own existence.

This cyclical structure rejects the classical cinematic model of time as a linear flow and instead forces us to confront duration as lived repetition—a central idea in Deleuze’s theory of modern cinema. The expression of sameness in early cinema might have been exposed in a linear narrative fashion.

The Edit

This is actually a longer scene that overlaps with the opening credits, and is worth taking in the full 90seconds or so.

The aggressive jump cuts in this scene further disrupt sensory-motor logic by creating time directly rather than using action as a bridge between images.

Further to Deleuze's taxonomy, there are a series of Opsigns (Optical Signs) of 'mother', who performs the same actions over and over, but the cuts disorient the audience, making time feel unstable.

There are additional Sonsigns (Sonic Signs): If the sound (e.g., sizzling butter, child’s laughter) also loops or slightly varies, it reinforces a sense of artificial continuity, while at the same time distorting time itself, and juxtaposing against the child-like music.

The audience, expecting a causal or natural flow, instead experiences time as fragmented and oppressive, mirroring the protagonist’s own loss of agency.

Watch the montage

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The film moves quickly, and in the first scene we are shifted quickly to within the reflexive mind of 'mother', when, at the supermarket she meets an old colleague who asks her;

"Do you just love getting to be home with him all the time?"

We, the audience see the protagonist answering what she really thinks; a long winded, from-the-heart, analysis of her struggle with motherhood. The scene then reverts to the colleague asking the question (seemingly again), and the protagonist replying how much she loves being a mother, a socially acceptable answer, given the surface-level nature of the encounter.

We the audience realise that the first answer was really just what was in her head, and not articulated out loud in the scene.

This disruption of traditional cause-effect narrative structure can be described by Deleuze's time-image. 

The protagonist’s initial, honest internal monologue, is followed by a socially acceptable response.

This use of the false continuity cut—where the audience first sees what appears to be an uninterrupted reality, only to have it revealed as an internal, subjective moment—creates a crystal-image.

Crystal-Image: Time Splitting into the Actual and the Virtual

The crystal-image is central to Deleuze’s time-image in Cinema 2.

The CRYSTAL-IMAGE occurs when two layers of time coexist, in this instance, The present (actual),The protagonist answers with a socially conditioned response. and The past (virtual), her true thoughts, which are presented as if they were spoken, are later revealed to be an internalised fantasy.

So as cinema analysts we know that this duality shatters the classical movement-image, where events unfold causally. Instead, it forces us to perceive time as forked, looping between what is thought and what is expressed.

As an audience member, we are immediately invited into Mother's subjective world, and from this moment forward we are put on alert, as we are experiencing this story, should we be asking ourselves, 'is this really happening'? and perhaps, 'does it matter?' if it isn't.

"I am hair and blood and bone...I'm gonna crush its skull"

Around the halfway mark of the film, we encounter perhaps the most Deluzian of moments, the transformation of 'Mother' into Dog.

Until this point, the film has been shaped by time-images —a cinema of interiority, where perception is interrupted by thought and self-reflection. But in this moment of transformation, thought collapses into action. We shift into a pure movement-image, where the logic is instinctual: Dog smells. Dog sees. Rabbit exists only as prey. Dog kills.”

The sequence can be described by the Deleuzian elements of frame, shot and montage. 

• Dog emerges from bushes
• Dog's snout comes into focus, as we hear it sniffing furiously, as a the steadicam moves
• The Dog's snout is still, only it's nose twitching
• Dog's PoV of the rabbit, centre focused in a wide-angle fish eye lens shot, shallow depth of field
• Shot looking upward of the Dog's face, and the internal monologue of "i'm gonna crush its skull"
• Frame / Shot of the dog in the bushes leaping forward, growling
• Reverse shot of the Dog landing on the rabbit and the sounds of bones being crunched
• Mid shot of the Dog dragging the rabbit away
• Final set of shots of the Dog, back at Mother's house, burying the rabbit in the hole. 

The affirmation of the transformation into dog, is the killing of the rabbit. This is where Mother simplifies her existance in to aspects of life and death, a sharp contrast the her incessant ponderings and existential concerns.

Frame

“The frame structures space as an almost closed system, defining characters, props, light, and sound as a compositional whole. Yet, as Deleuze argues, the frame always gestures toward a greater totality beyond itself—what he calls ‘the whole.’

In Nightbitch, the suburban setting exists at the edge of perception: the leafy streets, parked cars, and children’s playground beyond the mound where the rabbit sits. But within the frame, our gaze is locked onto a primal, reductive sequence—Dog. Rabbit. Dog. Dead rabbit.

The contrast is stark: the hollow, static order of suburbia against the raw instinct of nocturnal hunting.”

I think that this is the hollow meaningless of suburbian against the savagery of night-time hunting

Shot

“The shots preceding the moment of stillness—the twitching nose, the poised hesitation—are framed with shallow depth of field, pulling us into the dog’s predatory focus. Nearly every shot in this montage, except for one, is driven by movement:

The camera moves (steadicam tracking, wide-angle shifts).

And in doing so, it mirrors the immediacy of the dog’s sensory-motor schema: hunt, focus, kill.”

This moment is accompanied by the dialogue;

"I'm gonna crush its skull"

For me, the shot cuts too quickly to the leaping dog, before the sentance has been articulated. Perhaps, the editor played with different combinations, but I would have made the choice to stay a second or two longer on Dog's point of view on Rabbit, allowed the internal dialogue to complete, kill the music, raise the tension and then cut Dog leaping forward. 

Arguably the dialogue throughout the scene, provides some levity in what otherwise may have been a more sinister ethical message for the audience.

Montage

The montage, which is no more than 20 seconds in total, contains 12 shots, and thus, the sequence is enlivened by the the cuts, types of shots and differening perspectives.

This montage does not merely narrate—it immerses. The rapid alternation of close-ups, wide-angles, and shifting PoVs creates a collision of sensory intensities, aligning it most closely with Soviet dialectical montage.

• The thesis (perception-image): The still dog, eyes locked, poised in focus.

• The antithesis (action-image): The violent lunge, bones cracking.

• The synthesis (affection-image): The burial—an act of quiet, ritualistic finality.

Rather than adhering to classical continuity editing, this sequence creates a dialectic of instinct—perception drives movement, movement collapses into pure affect.

Nightbitch is an odd film, and one that perhaps didn't fully blossom for me, but was well made and had some impactful moments.

From the point of view of considering Deleuze's taxonomy, that framework was useful, I.E. there was a clear and bracing shift, described well by movement-image when Mother became dog. 

Through this Deleuzian lens several characterising points emerged, and from a practice point of view the analysis itself was valuable.

1. Sharpening the transition from time-image to movement-image (clarifying the existential shift).

2. Enhancing the discussion of the frame and the “whole beyond the frame” (emphasising suburbia vs. savagery).

3. Reworking the shot breakdown for greater rhythm and tension (letting the stillness before action breathe).

4. Clarifying the perception-action-affection structure in montage (tightening the Deleuzian dialectic).

In terms of the film itself, It appears to have backed off the most challenging aspects of its themes through the use of comedy and light heartedness in order to have more commerical appeal but nonetheless does a good job of conveying the experience of motherhood in a meta-modern context. However, there is a hollywood happy ending that I did cringe a little at.

I say this with the caveat that audiences in dissimiliar social and economic parts of the world may find it difficult to relate to affluent, american, mixed media modern artists with one child, who struggle.