Film review: Nightbitch

Cinema / Reviews - 30 November 2024

While Amy Adams shines, Nightbitch is ultimately a dog without a bone.

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The title alone sowed a seed of allure when it first joined the list of this season’s upcoming film releases. A modest plot digest and provocative trailer of Amy Adams flashing from the throes of maternity to crawling on all fours with a pack of dogs watered the plant. Writer & director Marielle Heller (A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood) tailors Rachel Yoder’s surrealist novel to a visually sharpened exploration of how a mother’s crossing with fulfillment, doubt, and identity gets a bit carnal. 

Early buzz may have shaped forecasts of a morose, stay-at-home mom’s metamorphosis garnished with dark tints of a creature feature, but through visionary fiction, Heller performs a more routine analysis. Amy Adams (American Hustle) dominates the screen as, simply, “Mother”. Exhibiting a physical transformation contrasting her appearance in other roles, Adams testifies to her acting range, winning empathy with humorous and blunt tirades, treading rising water as a loving, suburbanite parent with an art career sacrificed to a past life. You find yourself hating everything she hates. Torturous children’s music. Mundane routines. Expectations to befriend other parents simply because you both gave birth. Personifying exhaustion, Mother volleys with the dynamic of loving her young son, while at times seeing him like a wild animal she can’t tame, thinking “maybe if I don’t move, he won’t see me”.

Taking a page from David Cronenberg’s body-horror book, precise cuts and editing depict a destabilizing mental state. In place of the young body she once knew, Mother finds strange hairs in odd places, sharpening teeth, and feral attributes we’re left to wonder are real or imagined. Her business-travelling husband (Scoot McNairyArgo) assures her it’s all in her head. And he is just known as “Husband”, not “Father” to compliment Adams’ “Mother”. The tactless implication is that he’s not much of a father, preoccupied and unfamiliar with the demands of child-rearing.

A promising plot resorts to conventional narration 

Regret builds resentment. Mother no longer feels like an artist, as the piece of her she loved most is dead. Questioning her choices, primal impulses draw attraction while dogs start to occupy a mysterious presence in her life. Leaning into what feels like a natural transformation, Mother barks at the moon in a survival mode that redefines her empowerment as a mother and a woman. She goes from rolling with the punches to throwing them, from fearing she can’t create artistically anymore, to realizing she is the greatest creator of all, that of life.  

Abandoning an opportunity for uniqueness, the story retreats to elements better captured in Thelma & Louise, or even A Woman Under the Influence. The picture bites the hand that feeds it, teetering on sanctimonious. McNairy’s “Husband” goes from a genuinely accountable counterpart, to pathetically over apologetic. Mother wants to have her cake, and it eat too. Drifting away from expressing a normal drive for self-care to entitled selfishness, she castes blame outward while patting her own back. Oh yeah, what happened to the whole dog thing? That fades too. While Adams’ offers a top-notch performance, this film will most likely carve different impressions for audiences that are parents, and those who are not.  

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