TORONTO, Canada—Amy Adams is great and yet her career choices over the past few years—including Vice, Hillbilly Elegy, The Woman in the Window, and Dear Evan Hansen—have been anything but. Nightbitch, thankfully, reverses that trend.
A magic-realist fable about motherhood, identity, transformation, and the brutality and bliss of creating and cultivating life, writer/director Marielle Heller’s adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s novel, which just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival ahead of its Dec. 6 theatrical release, has an eye-catching title and a unique spirit to back it up. Resembling a bonkers marriage of Young Tully and Teen Wolf, and led by a ferociously naked and unafraid performance by its star, it’s an amusingly incisive howl of maternal pain, frustration, disappointment, resentment, and feral strength.
Adams’ unnamed Mother spends her mornings frying up breakfast for her adorable and unruly young Son (Arleigh Patrick Snowden and Emmett James Snowden), her days taking walks with him to the playground, and her nights vainly trying to get him to go to sleep beside her. Though she clearly cares for him, the monotony of her suburban existence, which she’s chosen over her past career as a celebrated New York artist, is causing her to slowly come apart at the seams.
At the library, she finds herself stuck joining a weekly “Book Babies” sing-a-long with other kids and mothers, and she can barely keep from throwing her hands up in the air and screaming at the sight of snot being wiped from noses and tears streaming down little faces, not to mention the cacophony of wails, laughter, gibberish, and awful ditties that are destined to worm their way into her brain.
Mother puts on the bravest face she can manage and makes her way through the world pretending that everything’s okay. At the same time, Nightbitch frequently has her burst into tirades about sexist social dynamics and her confusion and fears, which invariably turn out to be just the thoughts and opinions she wishes she could utter.
“I’m stuck in a prison of my own erection,” she laments in her mind to a cheery acquaintance at the grocery store. However, as someone who detests the idea of befriending women simply because they too are mothers (a notion she deems “pathetic”), the best Mother can muster when it comes to connection is a knowing smile at a fellow mom struggling to keep her daughter from grabbing every item off the store shelf.
Despite feeling that she’s “dumb” and destined to never again be smart, happy, or thin, Mother soldiers onward because she loves being a mom—even as she says that (to herself, and others) in order to conform to expectations. Adams’ protagonist is alternately, and sometimes simultaneously, compassionate and exasperated, patient and ready to explode.
Working from her own script, Heller generates humor from Mother’s exhaustion and exasperation at the wildness of her life and creation, who at the aforementioned sing-along announces to everyone that his name is “F---!” Nightbitch captures the chaos of early parenthood, and not merely in terms of the messes, mistakes, and unexpected miseries and magical moments; through interior narration, it also gives voice to women’s dissatisfactions with being reduced to stay-at-home servants and caregivers, their guilt over that discontent, and their contradictory feelings of devotion to, and irritation with, their offspring.
Reaching her boiling point, Mother discovers that she’s begun sprouting weird hairs on her tailbone and under her chin, as well as acquired a heightened sense of smell. This is laughed off by her Husband (Scoot McNairy), who’s habitually away on business trips, only to return home to feign wanting to be helpful while continuing to let his wife do the dirty work.
Shortly thereafter, Mother becomes a magnet for dogs, first at the park and then at her house, where they leave her dead-animal offerings. Encouraged by a book about mythic female shapeshifters given to her by a librarian (Jessica Harper), she develops a burning desire to act like a pooch, which initially manifests itself as a game she plays with Son to calm (i.e. train) him, and ultimately turns into a compulsion that causes her to take to the streets at night, shedding her skin to mutate into a gorgeous canine that runs through the streets, killing any prey that gets in her way.
No matter its out-there conceit, Nightbitch restrains itself from going totally over-the-top. Its fantasticality is always an outgrowth of its main character’s desire for freedom, agency, and strength, and its blend of the surreal and the real is often quite comical, as when a newly empowered Mother has her own one-woman sing-a-long in the car to Weird Al’s “Dare to be Stupid.”
The more she gets in touch with her primal instincts, the more Mother actively pushes back on Husband’s inconsiderate advice and uselessness around the house, instigating severe change. Nonetheless, far from a screed about the awfulness of domesticity and the awesomeness of independence, the film perceptively recognizes that Mother’s evolution need not result in a binary choice; on the contrary, the clarity, confidence, and might which she attains from tapping into her animalism binds her to Son and her role as his nurturer and protector.
Whereas flashbacks to Mother’s adolescent relationship with her mom obliquely suggest the witchy origins of her condition, Adams’ narration sometimes spells things out a tad too literally. Fortunately, her fiercely funny portrayal of the harried and hungry Mother is exceptionally nuanced, conveying with tired eyes, annoyed grimaces, and resigned smirks the various modes in which she, and all mothers, are compelled to operate.
From sprouting new sets of nipples and eating food out of bowls, to chasing squirrels and growling at pretentious art-scene friends with whom she now has nothing in common, Mother is a woman learning to tap into her inner beastliness. Heller imagines that process as an awakening of a true, ancient self, and the actress charts it with a weariness, distress, and fury that never overwhelms her hope for her, and her clan’s, future.
Nightbitch concludes with metamorphosis, death, birth, and rebirth, all of it begat by Mother’s craving for wholeness. Sublimely sharp, silly and moving, Heller’s latest is a charmingly off-kilter portrait of the way in which everyone benefits from women having it all—as well as a better breed of project for its illustrious leading lady.
