Tag: Skip

Amy Adams is a frustrated cooped-up depressed angry mom in Nightbitch (now streaming on Hulu). Oh, and as the title sorta suggests, she’s turning into a dog, although I’m not sure if that’s literal or metaphorical, because the movie intentionally leaves that, y’know, fuzzy. Writer/director Marielle Heller adapts the 2021 novel by Rachel Yoder, following a trio of excellent films – Mr. Rogers bio A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, the underrated Melissa McCarthy vehicle Can You Ever Forgive Me? and thoughtful provocative debut Diary of a Teenage Girl – with a self-described magical-realist dark-satire horror-comedy that tempts one to say it has a little more bark than bite, if one is inclined to wedge slightly ill-fitting hacky cliches into one’s critical commentary. But at least it doesn’t have us saying WOOF.

NIGHTBITCH: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Nightbitch is the type of slightly overbaked Metaphor Movie in which the characters don’t have names and are therefore labeled via archetype. Adams plays Mother, whose point-of-view dominates the film, therefore forcing the other key people in her life to be defined as Son (played, by turns, by twins Arleigh and Emmett Snowden) and Husband (Scoot McNairy), and not, say, Boy or Dad. I am annoyed by this corny literary technique, so I’ll hereby refer to them via actors’ last names. We meet Adams as she rolls her toddler Snowden through the grocery store. She bumps into a former colleague who asks Adams how her new stay-at-home-mom life is, and Adams responds with a lengthy tirade that’s the frustrated angry cooped-up woman-who-gave-up-her-career-to-be-a-suburban-mother version of America Ferrara’s speech in Barbie – but then the movie stops a quarter-inch shy of the record-scratch fzwoop sound as it pulls out the rug and reveals that she didn’t REALLY say all that, and instead replied with shiny happy motherhood-is-a-dream platitudes. Which is a lie people speak out loud and try to tell themselves, and is so rarely convincing to anybody.

Next is a sequence illustrating Adams’ daily grind, and it has to do with repeatedly frying prefab hash browns in a pan and chasing mac and cheese with wine and sitting on the floor playing choo-choo trains with the kid. We hear her internal monologue via voiceover, explicitly spelling out what we’re seeing on the screen, which is a tripwire with adaptations of novels that are so full of excellent words, you just want to cram them into movies. One of those monologues tells tells tells us all about how Adams regrets letting her kid sleep in bed with her because she fears he won’t learn to fall asleep by himself and she never gets a decent night’s sleep and she should’ve listened to all the experts who wrote books and now everything’s ruined. And you kind of don’t mind all the telling telling telling – instead of showing showing showing, as movies should do – because it’s so relatable. Motherhood is a precarious damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t experience, and she is so very much caught in the paralytic vice grip of depression.

Technically, Adams isn’t a single mom. McNairy travels a lot for work, so he’s frequently absent for days at a time. When he’s home, he seems like a decent, OK guy but he shouldn’t so fervently gripe about the lack of milk in the fridge, or say dumb things to his clearly psychologically flailing wife like “Happiness is a choice.” She frequently has to nudge him to hold up his end of the parenthood bargain when he’s home. When he’s gone, she schleps the boy to the library for cutesy mama-and-me sing-alongs almost out of obligation – they need something to do besides participate in the prefab hash brown ritual – and she barely tolerates being around the other shiny happy moms she’ll never, ever relate to. Adams has nowhere to turn. She’s on an island with a small demanding human who, she narrates, she “squeezed into the world… and will pee in your face without blinking.” She used to be an artist at the focus of gallery openings in New York City, and now she’s something else, something wholly unfamiliar.

Speaking of which. This dog thing. Adams starts finding weird hair on her. A few too many chin whiskers, a patch on her lower back that’s a little more aggressive than usual. There’s a lump on her tailbone that she lances like a boil and gobs of pus ooze out of it. Is she growing a tail? Oh jeez. Her sense of smell seems enhanced even more acutely than when she was pregnant. Silver lining: she finds joy in playing “doggie” with little Snowden. They trek to the grocery-store buffet and stick their entire faces in plates full of meatloaf, to the horror of all onlookers. She gets him to sleep on his own, finally – in a dog bed on the floor. They go to the park and she tends to attract dogs. She feels weird primal urges at night, and there’s a moment where she’s on all fours digging in the yard. Dead animals turn up on the doorstep and she doesn’t know – or seem to remember? – how they got there. As for the family cat? All I’ll say is uh oh. Adams is transforming. She’s vibrating. Look at her now!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Tully, Baby Boom and, uh, Wolfen form a milieu reminiscent of Nightbitch. (Note, Tully is terribly overlooked. Please stop overlooking Tully!) 

Performance Worth Watching: Adams earned a Golden Globe nom for this role, but that’s not exactly a ringing endorsement. She does transcend the limitations of this rather odd material with a give-it-the-good-ol’-college-try baldly unglamorous performance, and you can sense how the movie might not have a chance in hell of being functional with a less committed star. 

Memorable Dialogue: I’m not sure if Adams says this to McNairy in her head or in reality: “Also, I have eight nipples now, and I fear you’ll be repulsed.”

Sex and Skin: A couple non-nude sex scenes in which Adams indulges some canine kinks.

Our Take: Weird movie! Not weird enough, though. Heller’s David Cronenberg-via-mommy-blog approach to Nightbitch leaves its central metaphor undercooked: Why, exactly, is Adams becoming a dog instead of, I dunno, a raccoon or a cobra or a right whale? She feels increasingly feral in her feed-sleep-play nurture routine, but what specifically pushes her to dogdom? All wild animals are driven by primal instinct. Perhaps it’s simply easier to be a dog in suburbia than, say, a savage and violent hippopotamus. Too big. Stands out too much at the park. Requires too much food to be plausible. Too expensive for a quasi-indie movie budget. Wouldn’t give a damn about the family cat.

But, I considered partway through the film, maybe I’m overthinking things, and should follow the just-go-with-it tack. That ended up being underwhelming too – it lacks the visceral shock to be effective horror, or the gonzo ambition to be over-the-top funny. You sense a scalding satire beneath the surface that never reaches full boil. Heller soft-pedals the premise as if worried about alienating audiences that might wrinkle their noses at the thought of Amy Adams going full Pooch Mode, and the result is a series of calculated left turns that pushes the narrative toward familiar everything’s-going-to-be-OK/a-modern-woman-CAN-have-it-all pablum. 

That’s a disappointingly pat resolution for a movie provocatively titled Nightbitch, and that implies a degree of thematic envelope-pushing it doesn’t seem brave enough to entertain. It’s a collection of half-formed ideas – subplots about a trio of possibly like-minded playground moms, a librarian (played by an underused Jessica Harper) who seems to know more about bestial transformation than you’d expect and Adams’ mysterious mother (shown in flashbacks) get tantalizingly close to going somewhere, but are just thematic dead ends. There’s so much potential here to sow discomfort and inspire big laughs, but the movie seems unsure of itself, too wary to go anywhere too interesting lest it sacrifice the theoretical universal appeal of stories about frustrated mothers. This is a classic case of a movie that doesn’t know what it wants to be. JUST LEAN INTO IT you’ll yell at the screen. But it never does.

Our Call: I wanted to like Nightbitch more than I did. Adams is game. The premise is ripe. Everyone loves dogs. But the movie simply doesn’t work. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.