Nightbitch: Snarling at Motherhood with Amy Adams
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B-
Almost everything about Nightbitch sounds promising.
The film — available January 24 on Disney+ after a brief Oscar-qualifying theatrical run — is based on Rachel Yoder’s 2021 debut novel of the same name. The book was hailed as a witty feminist fairytale, perfectly timed to the frustrations of COVID lockdown.
With nods to Franz Kafka and Mary Shelley, Nightbitch is the story of a suburban mother, chained to 24-hour care of her two-year-old child, who finds — or perhaps imagines — herself transforming into a wild dog at night, not so much a werewolf as a free spirit.
Writer-director Marielle Heller, who adapted the book for the screen, has a track record for films that mix humour and generous curiosity about human nature (see The Diary of a Teenage Girl, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Can You Ever Forgive Me?). The film’s star Amy Adams balances relatable comedy with dramatic empathy.
In practice though, Nightbitch fails to converge their talents, resulting in a film of interesting moments that drifts to a tepid conclusion. For the first half-hour or so, at least, the film delivers as satire, before it drifts into horror and then into domestic drama.
An opening scene finds Adams, as Mother — formerly a sculptor and installation artist —looking convincingly haggard in baggy clothes and unkempt hair in a suburban supermarket. There she meets a fashionably dressed colleague from the downtown art world Mother used to inhabit when she had her own identity.
The other woman observes how rewarding it must be to stay at home with a baby, and Mother’s emotional floodgates open in a monologue. She rails about the weight gain, the devastating loss of self, the cultural marginalization, the exhaustion. “I’m deeply afraid that I’ll never be smart, or happy, or thin ever again.” When the other woman responds with an innocuous reply, we realize the monologue took place not in the real world, but in Mother’s head.
Nightbitch features several of these angry Walter Mitty-style fantasy sequences, with the novel’s stream-of-consciousness narration repurposed as voiceover. They include one scene where she wallops clueless Husband (Scoot McNairy) across the face after he manplains that she needs more structure in her life and “happinesss is a choice.” No, she didn’t hit him, but she just really wanted to.
Adams’ comic timing is consistently astute, even in turmoil. Motherhood, we see, is a purgatorial repeated sequence of breakfasts, bedtime stories and, in a moment of respite, a large glass of red wine each afternoon.
Then things start getting weird and, briefly, interesting as Mother begins to understand herself as a female animal. She discovers she has an enhanced sense of smell; she has furry patches of body hair and growing loathing of the family cat.
In a development that owes copyright royalties to David Cronenberg, her rage transforms into new flesh. She discovers an encysted tailbone, random hairs, extra nipples. She has insatiable taste for meat and starts eating face-first out of a bowl.
Dogs start gathering around her at the park and bring her dead animals to her home as gifts. Eventually, Mother apparently transforms into a bunny-killing Husky or, as Adam’s voiceover triumphantly declares, “a woman and animal, new and ancient.”
Before this amazing breakthrough has time to grow, Nightbitch pumps the brakes on the pulpy allegorical elements. Apparently, this transformation was neither the product of psychosis nor demonic possession, but something else. A fantasy?
In the last third, the film focuses instead Mother and Husband’s struggling marriage, and the film’s didactic aim rises to clunky prominence. It seems that Mother really needs more time to make art, art that will reveal her inner turmoil and teach Husband to be a better parent. Was this all an elaborate metaphor for the benefits of relationship counselling?
Throughout the film’s relatively brief 96-minute running time, a few other story strands are teased. They include flashbacks to Mother’s own mother, who gave up a promising singing career for family. Then there’s a prescient librarian Norma (Jessica Harper), who recommends that Mother read a book entitled A Field Guide to Magical Women, about women and animalistic transformations.
After some reluctance, Mother begins to see her common ground with other mothers at the Book Baby club (Zoë Chao, Archana Rajan, Mary Holland) who share meaningful looks though few insights.
In both Yoder’s novel and the film, it’s clear that the protagonist — a comfortably middle-class woman with one child, supported by her husband — is free from the educational, medical, and financial challenges that shape many mothers’ lives.
The subject here is motherhood itself, isolated from real-world conditions in near laboratory conditions to emphasize that giving birth is a transformative, sometimes brutally difficult event in a woman’s life, too often smothered in sentimentality and ideological cant.
Unfortunately, the film’s banal ending, and focus on one lucky woman’s successful resolution of her conflict, undermines the broader impact of the message.
Nightbitch. Written and directed by Marielle Heller, based on the novel by Rachel Yoder. Starring Amy Adams, Scoot McNairy, and Jessica Harper. Available on Disney+ January 24.