Nightbitch

I haven’t read Rachel Yoder’s 2021 source novel, but I suspect—given most of the film is just Amy Adams and her toddler son—the book contains a lot of internal monologue. Such prose is always a challenge for the screen, though films like American Psycho and Fight Club show it can be done successfully. Nightbitch is not one of those films.

The plot sees Adams play an unnamed former artist turned full-time mom to her toddler son. Her husband¹ travels often for work, rendering Adams effectively a single mom. An early scene in a grocery store sets the film’s tone, with Adams bumping into a former coworker who says something to the effect of, “You must love being home with your son.”

Adams replies with blunt honesty that she feels lonely and trapped and how this life wasn’t what she signed up for, before the film reveals her answer was a fantasy and Adams instead gives the expected, “Oh yes, of course,” with a forced smile.

Writer-director Marielle Heller reinforces Adams’s sense of confinement with a montage of repetitive scenes depicting her daily routine—making breakfast, playing with the baby, trying to get the kid to sleep. Her only socialization and break from the routine comes via story time at the library, where she feels alienated from the other mothers who all seem happy and content.

Then strange things start happening. Random dogs approach Adams in the park. A patch of white hair appears over her tailbone. Her sense of smell sharpens. Soon Adams is transforming into a dog at night, killing cats, and leading the neighborhood pack.

Empowered by her transformation, Adams kicks McNairy out of the house, returns to her art and puts on a successful exhibition. The film ends with the family reunited and camping in the woods.

For her part, Adams, who also served as producer, gives her all in a deliberately unglamorous role. She wears unflattering clothes and makeup and performs under often harsh lighting opposite a toddler. As the film turns absurd, she commits, barking, snarling, sniffing, and crawling on all fours. That her performance doesn’t elicit guffaws impresses.

But it’s a wasted performance in a film unsure of itself. Ostensibly a treatise on maternal alienation and identity loss, the film opens reminiscent of Fight Club, with Adams chafing against the conformist societal norms, while her dog form provides an alter-ego to encourage her rebellious impulses.

But the film loses its way almost immediately. Consider the scene where Adams joins her grad-school friends for dinner in the city. She struggles to connect with them, as she’s no longer a part of their world. A frustrated Adams then gags on her salad, stands up and starts barking at the group before grabbing a hamburger off another diner’s plate, taking a large bite, snarling, and storming out.

I’m not sure what Heller was trying to convey with the scene. The grad-school group seems vapid and sanctimonious. Adams’s isolation seems less a result of her motherhood and more a result of her simply having matured—leading one to feel she’s better off having left that world. Compounding matters, the incident exists in a vacuum, never addressed again in the film. When Adams throws her exhibition later in the film, the same grad-school friends all show up with no mention or hint of the dinner fiasco.

This notion of abandoned threads carries through the entire film. Relatively early, in the film’s most memorable sequence, Adams notices a large cyst on her tailbone. She takes a long needle, applies a flame to sterilize it, then punctures the bump. A goopy white fluid oozes out as Adams pushes her thumb and forefinger inside the protuberance and pulls forth a short lock of tail hair. It’s a gag-inducing visual that would fit a Cronenberg film, but like the dinner scene, it’s never addressed, and the film never again ventures into such goopy territory.

It’s like these scenes were remnants of prior drafts, scenes whose payoffs fell victim to rewrites and revisions, perhaps casualties of studio notes. This disjointed nature extends to the finale. The closing image has the family together and happy, selling the very illusion Adams opens the film railing against, leaving the viewer to wonder: What was the point?