Nightbitch

Amy Adams delivers a raw and nuanced performance in Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch, but whatever made Rachel Yoder’s debut novel such an acclaimed success doesn’t quite work here; it’s uneven with its tonal shifts and it’s just mixed bag, and whatever edginess that the film aims for ends up feeling compromised with its banality and attempts at feeling homely by the final stretch.

Amy Adams plays a nameless mother in the film that is referred to in the credits as Mother. Adams is quite transformative and, like Laura Dern, is never afraid to get ugly for her art. She gained weight for the role, and she completely transforms into a suburban house mom where she never misses one false note. There is even some effective body horror and metaphors in the film that deal with aging and hormonal changes women face during their middle age years. We follow Adam’s journey, and it doesn’t take long to realize that she is unhappy when Heller taps into her psyche during a conversation with an old friend, and that encounters with a supermarket where she imagines revealing just how stressful and exhausted, she really is. But she ends up being dishonest and claims how happy she is when deep down she clearly isn’t. We learn that Mother had put her career as an artist on hold to raise her 2-year-old named Son (played by twin brothers Arleigh and Emmett Snowden) is very adorable, though he comes with some annoyances of staying up late, endlessly crying, and painting on the indoor house walls.

Courtesy Searchlight Pictures

Meanwhile, Heller utilizes some clever montages with editor Anne McCabe to capture the repetitions of Mother and Son’s daily routines that consist of cooking hashbrowns with butter, eating breakfast, going to the playground, cleaning, and drinking red wine to find some comfort in the daily monotony. However, the ideas end up feeling overstated, as not only do we have Mother’s suffocating narration that spells everything out, but Heller oversells obvious metaphors that also spell out themes on motherhood’s correlation to something that should be more viewed as stoic and primitive.

Heller’s latest film aims for some satire; you can’t help but think of Little Children and Revolutionary Road, which were also films about stay-at-home housewives and mothers who raised their children with the mundane. However, those films were done with consistent edge and offered more complexity and didn’t offer cozy outcomes, which Nightbitch sadly succumbs to. Then Heller aims for some subtle body horror that offers commentary on aging and how our bodies change over time. This includes growing hair in her low back, her teeth sharpening, and her sense of smell heightening. Then Heller hints at magical realism, where Mother transforms into a dog and runs out in a suburban neighborhood with a pack of other canine dogs, only to wake up the next day with dead rodents, possums, and raccoons. Sadly, the body horror and magical realism feel misplaced and like they belong in an entirely different film, as the imagery comes off laughable in a bad way.

Courtesy Searchlight Pictures

There are some poignant, human moments in the film. Many involve scenes of Mother hanging out with another fellow stay-at-home mom she meets at a story hour at the local library. There are also some amusing and moving scenes involving her husband (Scoot McNairy), who travels for work and isn’t home Monday through Thursday. Even when the husband is home, he fails to help out, and Mother can’t even take a short nap and tensions arise.

Aside from that, Heller takes on too many stylistic approaches and different tones, and it ends up feeling craggy and uneven. The satire never ignites, the body horror is sketched over, and the magical realism feels forced, as if they were tacked on at the last minute for marketing purposes. The movie’s final ten minutes feel like they belong in a completely different movie, and the result is befuddling. While the film offers commanding commentary on the joys and truthful pains of motherhood, it never feels subversive but rather insipid.

Nightbitch is now playing in limited theaters.