Nightbitch (R)
Cast: Amy Adams, Scoot McNairy, Mary Holland, Kerry O'Malley
Release Date: December 6, 2024
Runtime: 1 hr. 38 mins.
Genre: Comedy, Horror
A woman (Amy Adams) pauses her career to be a stay-at-home mom, but soon her new domesticity takes a surreal turn.
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At its best, Nightbitch offers a deeply honest, emotionally unsettling portrait of the darker side of parenting. Unfortunately, those moments are counterbalanced by a metaphorical story element that devolves into an exercise in campiness so tonally at variance with the core story as to create a dissonance many viewers won't be able to overcome. The artificial fairy tale ending further undercuts some of the more serious thematic aspects. Watching Nightbitch, I felt as if I was being given the fusion of two films - one a serious look at marriage and parenting and the other a laughably bad allegorical misstep.
Perhaps the campiness is by design. Maybe the intention of director Marielle Heller in showing Amy Adams on all fours prancing around and yapping like a dog is to create a cheesy image that will stick with viewers, even though it piledrives the movie into Ed Wood territory. Perhaps it will work for some of those in the audience, but I'm not among them. There are scenes - principally those that show the impact of the stress of being a stay-at-home parent and how it can breed resentment and anger - that ring true. Then along comes a sequence in which Adams does things no serious actor should be expected to do. The lasting impression is not necessarily a positive one.
Adams, who plays a nameless "Mother," is struggling to maintain her sanity as a stay-at-home mom, a role for which she is ill-suited. She has tapped into a deep well of anger - anger at her husband (Scoot McNairy), a businessman who spends long periods of time away from home, anger at having given up her fulfilling career as an artist to watch her toddler son (Arleigh and Emmett Snowden), anger at the day-to-day grind of cleaning house. Eventually, the anger metastasizes into a literal transformation. Her body begins to exhibit canine characteristics (including developing a tail) and, one night, she becomes a were-dog, running with a pack and killing smaller animals (like rats, possums, and a cat).
One can immediately sense that the story might work better on the written page than in a movie. I have not read the source material, a 2021 novel by Rachel Yoder, but the kind of mystical realism (in this case, lycanthropy) built into the narrative's DNA falls apart when transferred from the real of literature (which employs the imagination to form images) to the screen (where everything is concrete). And, although Nightbitch self-proclaims itself to be a comedy (and justifies this via blisteringly satirical elements), there are a few too many times when we're laughing at the movie rather than with it.
None of the film's ideas are new but that doesn't diminish the effectiveness of their presentation. Marielle Heller's screenplay illustrates a common regret of some women who feel pressured by family or society to give up a career in order to propagate the species. The main character feels trapped by circumstances and is infuriated that not only does her husband not seem to be making similar sacrifices but he is oblivious to her situation. One scene illustrates this dynamic perfectly: while she is lying in bed trying to coax her restless son to sleep, the husband is in another room playing a video game.
Nightbitch was originally intended to drop directly on Hulu but a last-minute decision was made to give it the limited theatrical release to allow Adams to be in consideration for a Best Actress Oscar nomination. Is this an award-worth performance? In the more grounded scenes, Adams is very good. She gets the character, conveying the myriad, shifting emotions that Mother feels. But when I think of Adams in Nightbitch, the lingering image is of her mimicking a dog, and it's not a good look. Daring, perhaps, but it simply doesn't work. It feels like something out of a Monty Python sketch.
Even those who buy into the woman-to-dog conceit may have problems with the ending which is so saccharine that it undercuts the movie's serious themes. Movies like Nightbitch have a higher responsibility when it comes to the suspension of disbelief curve. They have to establish an alternate reality, draw the viewer in, and hold them there. The ending is so artificial that, like the scenes of Adams on all fours, it ejects the viewer out of the experience. Nightbitch is a great title but the same superlative can't be applied to the movie as a whole.
© 2024 James Berardinelli
Synopsis
A woman (Amy Adams) pauses her career to be a stay-at-home mom, but soon her new domesticity takes a surreal turn.