Playing a stay-at-home mom who believes she is turning into a dog, Amy Adams lets out a feral howl against the woes of modern womanhood in Nightbitch, a potent but uneven adaptation of the eponymous book by Rachel Yoder published in 2021.
Adams' character, known only as Mother in the film, has given up a successful career as an artist to have a baby. Two years later, she is stuck at home in the suburbs with her toddler son (referred to only as Baby and played by cute blond twins Arleigh Patrick Snowdon and Emmett James Snowdon), while her husband, Father (Scoot McNairy), goes off to work which often takes him away for days at a time.
Opening with some briskly comic montage sequences, writer-director Marielle Heller vividly establishes the grinding frustration and sheer repetitive monotony of Mother's daily routine: cooking the same breakfast, making the same trip to the supermarket, taking the same walk with her son to the park and to the local library. She holds herself to be a cut above the other suburban moms in the "Book Babies" class at the library, but when she meets up with glamorous former colleagues from New York's gallery world she feels hopelessly drab and out of place. "I'm never going to be happy, smart, or thin ever again," she laments.
Then, however, she begins noticing strange things happening to her. A trio of neighborhood dogs start following her around and leaving gifts of dead animals on her doorstep. She discovers she has a heightened sense of smell and, more disconcertingly, finds she is sprouting a fuzz of white fur at the base of her spine. She races in bare feet through the nighttime streets and returns home filthy. Is she transforming into a dog?
Heller takes Yoder's biting satirical allegory about the inequities facing women in wealthy Western countries and runs with it. But only so far. The story's canine conceit is a striking metaphor for the primal nature of motherhood, and Heller brings the idea to life in a way that is raw and fierce. But her film doesn't really bare its fangs.
Nightbitch shares some elements with the recent wave of feminist body horror films, most notably Coralie Fargeat’s gross-out masterpiece The Substance, in which Demi Moore’s aging TV fitness host takes an illicit drug to create a younger version of herself. There are suggestions that Nightbitch is going to turn into icky horror, too, and some of the scenes in which Mother discovers herself changing are definitely designed to make us squirm. The presence of cult actress Jessica Harper, star of Dario Argento's 1977 horror classic Suspiria, in the role of the wise librarian who suggests Mother seek out a book called "Field Guide to Magical Women", also seems to point that way. In the end, however, Nightbitch veers away from this destination, aiming more for humor than horror.
The film's satire certainly takes lumps out of men for their uselessness at co-parenting. McNairy’s Father is well-meaning but totally clueless and ineffectual when it comes to doing his share of looking after Baby. The resentment Adams' Mother feels because of this reminded me of the plight of Daisy Ridley’s postpartum depressed young mother in Magpie, another recent film to take an imaginative swipe at parenting inequality. Yet whereas Shazad Latif's boorish husband in Magpie is utterly irredeemable, in Nightbitch McNairy’s hopeless Father is supposed to retain our sympathy.
The rather too cozy resolution Nightbitch contrives for Adams’ Mother isn’t entirely successful and there are other slight misjudgments along the way. Adams’ voice-over sequences, an echo of the book’s first-person narrative, are unnecessarily over-emphatic, and the scenes in which she imagines her responses to certain provocations — as when she fantasizes slapping Father for his insensitivity — don’t fully work either. These missteps are a disappointment coming from Heller, who has barely put a foot wrong in her first three films as a director — daring coming-of-age movie The Diary of a Teenage Girl starring Bel Powley, the wickedly scabrous Can You Ever Forgive Me? with Melissa McCarthy as a curmudgeonly literary forger, and the heart-warming A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood about beloved US children's TV show host Fred Rogers, played by Tom Hanks.
Adams holds nothing back as the film's protagonist, fearlessly embracing the role's rage and confusion, although her designation as Mother is not only a sign of her Everywoman status but also an indication that we are not to expect a fully nuanced character. All the same, Nightbitch makes its points forcefully and entertainingly. If nothing else, Heller's film is a ferocious exhortation for more equitable parenting.
Nightbitch has been slated for a December 6 release date exclusively in movie theaters in the US and UK.
