When Nightbitch was first announced as a film, its sheer oddness was hard to ignore – a film with a, let’s say, ‘punchy’ title in which Amy Adams, directed by the three-for-three so far Marielle Heller, slowly transforms into a dog, how could that not be interesting? And yet, somehow, deeply uninteresting is exactly what Nightbitch is. Here is a film reaching for edgy profundities about the nature of women and motherhood that actually has absolutely nothing incisive or novel to say, no funny jokes to make, and an inability to even fully deliver on the campy weirdness of its premise.
Adapting the novel by Rachel Yoder, Nightbitch has Adams as an unnamed Mother, a lapsed artist and stay-at-home mum for her toddler (also nameless), while her husband (Scoot McNairy) gets to escape the parenting grind with an undefined but clearly high-flying corporate job. Overwhelmed by the lack of sleep, loss of identity, and being taken for granted, the Mother is on course for some sort of psychological break, and it comes in the form of an unshakeable feeling that she’s transforming into a dog, regressing back to the primal nature that pregnancy, birth, and motherhood really belong to.
It’s a fine enough central metaphor, but (unusually for her) Heller’s script doesn’t have a single original thought in its head beyond this headline conceit. I’ve read more positive reviews that say this offers new insights into the struggles of motherhood, but that would only be true if you hadn’t ever watched, read, or listened to literally any mum-based story (fictional or real) for the entire 21st Century. Everything here, from the notion of motherhood as godhood to the blithering idiot unaware husband, is insanely broad strokes, no deeper than an opinion/experience column you’d find in any weekend edition of a newspaper, and actually less powerful because Nightbitch is so weak on specifics.
Men are fools, babies are hard, and out-of-touch bougie artists are prissy and privileged. That’s it, that’s the extent of Nightbitch’s insight/satire. Is it wrong? No. Is it interesting? Again, no. Ok, so does the dog stuff at least provide some freaky-deaky entertainment? Beyond a few fleeting moments of half-hearted body horror, no – Nightbitch doesn’t have the courage of its own convictions to really put its central idea to the test and, by the end, it doesn’t seem like any of it mattered anyway, informed as we are by Adams’s thuddingly dull voiceover that things will probably be fine.
Outside of bad narration duties, Adams’s performance is serviceable, and she does commit fully to the dog stuff when she has to. Credit where credit is due, though – her bond with her toddler (played by twins Arleigh and Emmett Snowden) is remarkable, and these two very young kids are naturals in front of the camera. To get this much coherent, usable footage out of these interactions must have been a herculean feat, and though it ends up as more of a logistical achievement than an artistically elevating one, it shouldn’t be ignored. Yet, when the best part of your film is a behind the scenes triumph, I think that rather says all that needs to be said about the qualities of what’s in front of the camera. Nightbitch is Heller’s first miss, and it is a huge one, while it is genuinely kind of tragic to see Adams’s post-Sharp Objects career continue to careen from low to low to low.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 