Festival Predictions

2024 Sundance Film Festival Predictions: Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch

Published on November 15, 2023

Marielle Heller broke out big at Sundance back in 2015 with coming-of-ager The Diary of a Teenage Girl – the pic received a lot of fanfare and the Special Jury Award for Cinematography (Brandon Trost). Following 2018’s Can You Ever Forgive Me? and critical hit A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019), we now have Nightbitch — a book-to-film adaptation that was originally set up at Annapurna but then sold to the Searchlight/HULU folks. It was likely going to receive a 2023 release but it looks like they might want some film fest play to help the film get out of the gates. Production took place in the summer of 2022 in Los Angeles with the likes of Amy Adams, Scoot McNairy, Mary Holland, Ella Thomas, Garrett C. Phillips and Zoe Chao.

Gist: This is about a suburban mom thrown into the stay-at-home routine of raising a toddler. As she embraces the feral power deeply rooted in motherhood, she becomes increasingly aware of the bizarre and undeniable signs that she may be turning into a dog.

Production Co./Producers: Annapurna’s Megan Ellison, Bond Group Entertainment’s Stacy O’Neil and Amy Adams, Anne Carey, Stacy O’Neil, Christina Oh, Adam Paulsen, Sue Naegle and Defiant By Nature’s Marielle Heller.

Prediction: Premieres.

U.S. Distributor: Searchlight/HULU.

Eric Lavallée

Eric Lavallée is the founder, CEO, editor-in-chief, film journalist and critic at IONCINEMA.com (founded in 2000). Eric is a regular at Sundance, Cannes and TIFF. He has a BFA in Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. In 2013 he served as a Narrative Competition Jury Member at the SXSW Film Festival. He was an associate producer on Mark Jackson's This Teacher (2018 LA Film Festival, 2018 BFI London). In 2022 he served as a New Flesh Comp for Best First Feature at the 2022 Fantasia Intl. Film Festival. Current top films for 2022 include Tár (Todd Field), All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen), Aftersun (Charlotte Wells).