Movie Review
‘Nightbitch’ Proves That Modern Motherhood Is a Motherf-cker
Amy Adams and director Marielle Heller give bark and bite to this bestseller adaptation about a mom experiencing after-hours canine liberation
Nightbitch, director Marielle Heller’s adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s bestselling novel, shows you its preferred hand — or maybe it’s closer to a pre-furried paw — right from the get-go. A mom, played by Amy Adams, is shopping for groceries with her two-year-old son. She happens to run into the woman who’s replaced her at her old gallery job, now that she’s chosen to be a stay-at-home mother. Her frenemy says that it must be wonderful to spend so much concentrated time with her toddler. When Mom — she’s only referred to by her parental status throughout the film, by the way; her identity hasn’t been stolen so much as co-opted — opens her mouth to reply that yes, of course it’s amazing, what pops out instead is a monologue of disappointment, insecurity, confusion, bewilderment at how her body has changed, rage at the social inequities around parenthood and partnerships, and the sneaking suspicion that she’s trapped in a stifling prison of her own construction.
Then, after Adams nails this rant of maternal sound and fury, signifying that the kids may be all right but the matriarchs of the world are anything but, Heller rewinds and resets the moment. The woman from her old gallery job once again says that it must be wonderful to spend so much concentrated time with her toddler. Mom smiles and says, “Yeah, I do. I love it. I love being a mom.” Because what else can she say? What else is she technically allowed to say without feeling like, y’know, a “bad mommy?”
Make no mistake: Nightbitch is not here to warn you that giving birth to, and then taking on the bulk of responsibilities around raising a child, is hard. That’s a given. What it would like to convey is that modern motherhood is definitely a motherfucker, and that the quaint notion that such a “dirty little secret” can only be discussed within the confines of mommy groups and wine-sodden afternoons, or simply screamed furtively into a pillow, should be extinct. Yoder’s book dove headfirst into the realities faced by many women who found the gap between the expectations around parenthood and the experience itself to be leagues apart, before taking an intriguingly magical and brutal detour into primal-scream fantasy. And if Heller’s film occasionally backs off from the full howling-at-the-moon intensity of the source material, it still manages to slouch away with more than a little blood on its incisors.
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You could say that Heller specializes in providing forums for “difficult” (read: complicated) women, having made her extraordinary debut with the frank 2015 adaptation The Diary of a Teenage Girl, handed Melissa McCarthy a plum antihero role in 2018’s Can You Ever Forgive Me?, and captured Heidi Schreck’s Broadway hit What the Constitution Means to Me for posterity in 2020. (We’d include her justifiably praised performance as a chess champ’s mom in The Queen’s Gambit in this lot as well.) It’s tough to think of another contemporary American filmmaker who’d be better suited to constructing a sympathetic yet still-scathing stage on which Adams’ unnamed protagonist could rage without reducing her to the sum of her growls and yowls. Life as a stay-at-home mom is, however, immediately sketched out as an endless montage of cooking, cleaning, story reading, swing pushing — higher, higher, higher! — and acting as her child’s insta-playdate. Her son (played tag-team style by the towheaded twins Arleigh and Emmett Snowden) may indeed be adorable. The numbing, rinse-repeat repetition is still a grind.
Life outside of the routine isn’t much better, given that the non-monikered mother isn’t keen on bonding with the other beleaguered moms at the local library’s pre-naptime sing-alongs. The more an eager-beaver trio of fellow mommys (Zoe Chao, Archana Rajan, and Mary Holland) try to befriend her, the more alienated she feels. Her husband (Scoot McNairy) is gone on business trips a lot, and seems slightly clueless in terms of both basic child-rearing duties and how much support his wife truly needs. And what’s up with these weird tufts of hair that seem to be sprouting in the small of her back, or what appears to be the nub of a tail where her backbone ends?
[A quick word about McNairy’s character, who’s drawn a lot of flack since Heller’s movie debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival back in September. Some folks have expressed that this gent is less a flawed spouse than a straw man, simply bumbling his way through scenes and/or seeming shocked that he doesn’t get a pass simply by being there, just so Adams’ exhausted mother on the verge of a nervous breakdown can seem justified in her frustration. He does tend to run the gamut from oblivious to an outright prick — you wanna shake him when his self-centeredness boils over during an argument — and it’s noteworthy to mention that McNairy humanizes him without sanding down the rough edges. But we’ll also suggest that his distracted, discomfiting father isn’t nearly as much of a caricature as people might think. Trust us on this. And some of those more vocal critics with XY chromosomes may wanna take a long, hard look in the mirror. The truth can sometimes be a bitch to handle, bro.]
It’s after a pack of dogs surround Ma and her son at the park, but before Adams starts digging around her front yard on all fours, that Nightbitch sets the stage for something a little more high-conceptual than just a diary of a mad house-mom. The question is not how or why this character begins turning into a furry, rodent-killing canine at night, which Heller shows via a few suggestive body-horror shots and quick cuts, but what the after-effect of the transformation is. The answer is liberation, which Adams gives you via a performance that seems designed to be as divisive as the film itself. There’s a complete lack of self-consciousness in Mother’s wolfing down handfuls of meatloaf or playfully woofing at strangers in public, and that’s matched by what Adams is doing to bring this woman to life. She’s unafraid to be unlikable, messy, and gross, not to mention courting the risk of losing the audience at certain key points. Yet Adams is also not timid when it comes to looking downright silly, and you can’t accuse her of not committing fully to the notion of this woman finding a sense of self by losing herself to doggy-style escapades after business hours.
Once that loss becomes her gain — as a woman, as an individual, as a mother, and eventually once more as an artist — and the movie narrows its focus on this notion of postpartum rebirth, the film coasts along on the combo of uneasiness and fuck-off giddiness for a good long while. There is a sense that it could have gone further out and pushed even more boundaries, especially before tying everything back up with a “happy” ending that feels mostly but not quite completely earned. But there’s still a bark and a bite here in the way that it’s allowing a specific strain of too-often-stifled female rage to really bloom. For those of us used to seeing and hearing the IRL “dirty little secret” of motherhood not being a fairy tale, if not firsthand then certainly by proxy and proximity, the notion of a conversation-starting movie that even partially goes there is exhilarating. For those who know the feelings that Heller and Co. are tapping into all too well — Nightbitch has your back. Representation matters.