Instead of Committing, Nightbitch Just Chases its Tail

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Unfortunately, I’ve grown accustomed to watching Amy Adams give a stellar performance in a less than stellar film. From her role in Hillbilly Elegy (2020) to her scattered appearances as Lois Lane in Zack Snyder’s regrettable DCEU films, I have followed Adams’ later career on my hands and knees begging for someone, anyone to offer her a role in a film that will match the greatness of Arrival (2016) and break her terrible film streak. Nightbitch did not answer my call.

Based on Rachel Yoder’s 2021 novel of the same name and directed by Marielle Heller, Nightbitch follows a stay-at-home mom who transforms into a dog to escape the everyday mundanity of motherhood. Adams plays the titular Nightbitch, who goes by no other name except “Mother”—the first sign that this film would be all metaphor and little depth. Mother spends her days cooking the same food for her son and visiting the same park, doing the majority of the heavy lifting as a parent while her husband travels for work. She reminisces about her life as an artist before she became a mother and spends much of the film monologuing about her feelings, speaking her every thought aloud to no one in particular. Although this was likely the easiest way for Heller to lift entire passages from Yoder’s book, it also means that Nightbitch is bogged down by swathes of voice-over narration that reiterate the same thing over and over: “I am a woman,” “I am an animal,” “I am powerful.” It all feels somewhat reminiscent of the kind of empty feminism you’d find on Tumblr circa 2014: flowery statements about the burdens and strengths of womanhood, but no real engagement with anything beyond the surface.

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Time and time again, Mother makes clear her anger and feelings of resentment around being a stay-at-home mom. The film literally opens with her admitting “I’m just angry all the time,” but despite her constantly repeating this assertion, the film never allows us to witness her anger in any meaningful way. Her frustration is translated through withering glares, sharp words and imagined violence, but that violence is never allowed to peak. Instead, her anger is bottled until it manifests as a physical transformation into an animal, a weak metaphor that suggests a mother’s rage can only be understood through animalistic terms. When Mother accepts her newfound physicality as a dog, she declares, “I was once a girl, a bride, a mother. And now I will be this.” One would be forgiven for assuming that the implication of a natural progression from mother to animal would lead to a discussion of the intense physical and psychological impact of pregnancy and childbirth on the human body, but the film remains largely uninterested in any of that. In fact, Nightbitch has a surprising lack of interest in female rage at all.

This is a story is about a self-professed angry woman who never actually screams. She barks, she growls, she glares, but there is never a cathartic moment of release that allows for her rage to be unleashed. Her moments of anger are predominantly relegated to her animal form and daydreams where she imagines slapping her husband or pouncing on him like a wolf. For what it’s worth, Adams gives her all as the titular character. She delivers her more violent lines with comedic flair and embraces the physicality of a woman-turned-dog with ease, giving a stellar performance in a shallow film. The image of Adams running around on all fours and howling with a pack of dogs is entertaining, sure, but somewhere along the way, that potential for the film to be something truly strange and unique dissipates, and the very real anger that Adams’ character felt at becoming “the housewife [she] never wanted to be” dissolves into a bafflingly tame exploration of motherhood.

In line with many conversations surrounding motherhood, this film presents being a mother as an isolating experience that stands in the way of a successful career. Motherhood in Nightbitch is a burden that women are forced to endure. Mother posits the question, “How many women have delayed their greatness while the men around them didn’t know what to do with theirs?” and rambles about the godlike power that comes with creating life. At one point, she even declares that the woman she used to be “died in childbirth,” and this idea is reiterated when she returns to her roots as an artist only after separating herself from the family unit. But for all its focus on the tragedy of losing your identity, the film does not give relationships outside of the family much screen time.

The film touches on the significance of bonds between women—the strength of the mother-daughter bond, the community that can be found amongst other mothers, the knowledge that can be passed from older women to the next generation—but these moments are fleeting. Heller, rather perplexingly, takes light aim at the pretension of Mother’s artist friends or the supposed commonness of the other mothers before Mother finds fulfilment in returning to both circles. Instead of teasing out these loose threads to form fully realized connections between her characters, Heller spends more time jumping between magical realism and superficial social commentary, forcing the narrative to fall into a pattern of repetition: Mother is exhausted after looking after her baby, she monologues about feeling like an animal, she transforms into that animal, and so the cycle continues. Mother’s relationships get lost in this repetition, making her ultimately come across as a stale and rather limited character.

The film is constantly hinting toward something deeper, something weirder, but it never quite gets there. There is exactly one scene that verges on body horror, but the film otherwise plays it safe when it comes to the potential for strangeness in this story. The metaphor of the animal transformation lends itself to discussions about postpartum psychosis or declining mental health, and one can’t help but wonder what the film could have been if Heller dug deeper into these themes. Instead, she avoids leaning into the kind of magical realism that would’ve allowed her film to be something of interest, and as a result, the film takes a cursory approach to the trappings of motherhood, presuming—as a man might—that a mother’s anger is simply limited to the domestic and can be cured by an apology.

In this way, Nightbitch feels more like a basic guidebook for new fathers than it does a satisfying exploration of motherhood for women. Mother feels like an outsider’s perception of what it means to be a mother rather than a genuine insight into the struggle to balance motherhood with a career. The film strives towards something profound but falls flat in its reluctance to embrace the surrealism of its plot. Perhaps the film works better as a run-of-the-mill horror comedy about a woman who regrets sacrificing her career to start a family, but as a so-called revolutionary take on motherhood, Nightbitch is stagnant and spends too much time chasing its own tail to an unsatisfying conclusion.

Director: Marielle Heller
Writer: Marielle Heller
Stars: Amy Adams, Scott McNairy, Arleigh Snowden, Emmett Snowden, Zoë Chao, Jessica Harper
Release date: Dec. 6, 2024

Nadira Begum is a freelance film critic and culture writer based in the UK. To see her talk endlessly about film, TV, and her love of vampires, you can follow her on Twitter (@nadirawrites) or Instagram (@iamnadirabegum).