‘Nightbitch’ Review: Motherhood Gets a Brilliant Amy Adams Barking Mad in a Satire That Promises Ferociousness but Pulls Too Many Punches
When you have a title with the blunt-force impact of Nightbitch and a premise as seemingly outrageous as a woman who responds to the isolation, alienation and self-sacrifice of motherhood by turning canine, you don’t want a movie that holds back. But Marielle Heller’s adaptation of the 2021 Rachel Yoder novel, while it starts out promisingly with sharp humor and tantalizing jabs of incipient weirdness, doesn’t take its ideas far enough to be seriously provocative. That’s too bad for Amy Adams, who runs with everything the story throws at her but gets shortchanged by the script.
It’s hardly a radical revelation at this point that not every housewife and mother is June Cleaver, no matter what regressive world J.D. Vance wants to live in. But it’s disappointing that a book greeted as a feminist fairy tale, which dared to say out loud some dark truths about the more often unspoken conflicts of motherhood, has been defanged. Sure, it’s about a woman who surrenders to primal instincts as a means of clawing back a part of herself that was lost. But the darkness is ameliorated by the need to keep reassuring us that no matter how much mighty female rage she unleashes, her love for her child is never in question.
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Nightbitch looks sharp — crisp and clear in the daylight and plunged into mysterious, moody depths after dark. But the project calls for the more daring Heller who savored the savage wit and unapologetically abrasive edges of her protagonist in Can You Ever Forgive Me? Instead, the writer-director curbs the chaos far too swiftly, as if she hasn’t yet shaken off the consolatory warmth of Mr. Rogers, whose life and work she celebrated in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.
The plot bears similarities to Marianna Palka’s 2017 indie horror-comedy Bitch, with Jason Ritter and Jaime King, which also got off to a fierce start then didn’t fully deliver. Both films seek to debunk the Mommy Culture notion that the experience of childbirth magically turns women into selfless creatures able to find fulfillment in their complete dedication to the little humans they hatched — as if giving birth automatically changes a woman’s genetic wiring.
Nightbitch, while it runs just a little over 90 minutes, often feels sluggish; the movie has the truncated feel of a story squeezed so tight that its points about loss of identity and the animalistic urge to reclaim it become fuzzy, almost banal. It’s disconcerting when the emancipating experience of a character who transforms into a Husky and starts ripping the throats out of bunnies becomes secondary to the salvation of a marriage. The movie dips a toe in the waters of body horror but chickens out before diving in. It doesn’t seem to have clear ideas about exactly what it wants to be.
Adams is reason enough to see it anyway in a performance that gives us intimate access to her character’s fears and anxieties. She brings expert comic timing to the woman identified in the credits only as Mother and has a sly way of drawing us into her way of thinking, not exactly normalizing the bizarre physical changes and unnatural impulses she’s experiencing but gradually accepting them with something closer to amusement than alarm.
Mother was an accomplished artist, known for sculptures and installations, before she gave up her career to stay home and look after a son she calls Baby (played by adorable twins Arleigh Patrick and Emmett James Snowden) while her Husband (Scoot McNairy) strolls off to work in a job that keeps him away for days at a time. Like Adams’ character, neither the father nor son is given a name.
A funny opening scene in that temple of the homemaker, the supermarket, has the frazzled-looking Mother, tired-eyed and puffy, pushing Baby in a grocery cart when she runs into her sleekly put-together replacement in her former gallery job. When the colleague asks Mother how she’s doing, she lets loose a spectacular rant about being subsumed by the numbing routines of maternal responsibility, with an incongruously chipper sweetness despite her desperation and simmering anger.
The other woman’s benign response clues us in that many of the protagonist’s words are spoken only in her head. The same goes for certain actions, like a sharp slap across Husband’s face when he responds to her growing concerns by telling her she just needs structure, before offering the empty platitude: “Happiness is a choice.” Later, he says he wishes he could stay home all day with the boy instead of going to work. But when he takes on even one childcare task, like bathtime, so his sleep-deprived wife can relax, he interrupts her every few minutes with requests to fetch something or other.
Adams plays Mother’s growing exasperation in moments like that with the infuriated impatience of the countless women who ever felt like unpaid round-the-clock servants, with husbands who remain willfully oblivious to the demands of the job. But without diminishing the bone-deep exhaustion, Adams’ light touch also makes it funny — never more so than when Husband sheepishly proposes sex (“Do you wanna…?”) and she replies with a weary “God, no.”
Two years after the birth of her child, she feels irrelevant, erased. While she’s out for a rare evening off with old art-world colleagues she admits with a frankness devoid of self-pity that she’s become “just this sagging mom with nothing intelligent to add to the conversation.”
“What fresh hell awaits you today?” Mother asks the bathroom mirror, as it starts getting harder to dismiss the strange things happening to her as perimenopausal side-effects. Her sense of smell is heightened, her teeth look sharper, dogs start being drawn to her in the park, she sprouts patches of fur, gets a freakish surprise when she pops what she thinks is a cyst on her lower back and another when she looks down and discovers extra nipples.
There’s a magic realist element to the dogs who assemble outside her house at night, bringing gifts of dead critters. It’s not long before she’s on all fours sniffing the ground, then bolting off down the street once her full physical transformation takes place (nice work from the special effects and prosthetics team).
Self-doubt has eaten away Mother’s sense of who she is. When she makes the poignant realization that she’s no longer an artist (“the most silly, self-absorbed thing you can be”) and is now free to share in every moment of Baby’s development, she’s talking herself into it rather than believing it. But once she starts running with the pack, she is reborn as “woman and animal, new and ancient,” vowing to feel shame no more. These scenes have a dangerous thrill, a raw power the movie could use more of.
Maybe decisions were made in the editing room to trim the surreal, four-legged night flights, but it’s perplexing that Heller loses interest so quickly in the canid allegorical thrust that drives Mother’s cathartic self-renewal. It undersells Adams’ full-throttle commitment to the role’s extremes by reducing her weird and wonderful nocturnal forays into a stepping-stone toward a more equitable balance in the marriage.
While McNairy makes Husband annoyingly inattentive, the actor is also careful not to let him become a complete douche. There’s humor in his admission that solo Baby duty — which allows Mother to throw herself back into her art — is hard. But it feels like a betrayal of the story’s whole reason for being that his redemption takes up so much space.
Nightbitch is a film that should make us squirm, but its path to marital harmony seems designed to soothe, not challenge. “Motherhood is fucking brutal,” says the protagonist. But then suddenly, it’s not, a tidy resolution driven home in a WTF? scene right before the end credits roll.
There’s narrative texture in Mother’s recollections of a childhood in what appears to be a Mennonite community, which she thought she had archived away, and her new affinity for the sadness of her mother, who briefly fled the constraints of domesticity but came back, with no explanation. There’s also enigmatic librarian Norma (Jessica Harper), who seems to get exactly what Mother is going through, recommending that she read a mystical manual titled A Field Guide to Magical Women. But these threads feel naggingly incomplete.
Her encounters with three other mothers she meets at the library’s Book Babies circle (led in song by the film’s inventive composer and the director’s brother, Nate Heller) are more satisfying. At first, she rolls her eyes and scoffs inwardly at the simplistic thought that the commonalities of being moms should make her enjoy the company of other moms. But as she gets to know Jen (Zo? Chao), Miriam (Mary Holland) and Liz (Archana Rajan), they drop subtle clues that there could be something more to them than their designated parenting roles.
Those wry scenes hint at the more complex and subversive movie Nightbitch could have been had it expanded the fantastical escapes of one severely stressed woman with a husband who just doesn’t get it into a broader and spikier examination of maternal confinement. The title and setup promise something truly feral, but the movie essentially gets spayed.
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