While memories of the film itself might fade all too fast, it’ll probably take a while to tire of repeating the phrase “Amy Adams is Nightbitch”. The six-time Oscar nominee, stuck on a limp, losing streak of late with anonymous try-hard misfires like Hillbilly Elegy and Dear Evan Hansen, has taken on a goofy, lightly gory role in a film with one of the silliest, most attention-securing titles of the traditionally self-serious Oscar season. If only it was as daring or as mischievous as its name and logline: malcontent suburban mother turns into dog. But the film is all bark and no bite, a shame for its lead – but moreso for its as yet infallible writer-director.
Marielle Heller had yet to really miss with The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Can You Ever Forgive Me and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood – a straight-out-of-the-gate trio of winners. But she can’t quite find a way to transform Rachel Yoder’s biting, absurdist novel into a worthwhile movie. It’s all smug pointing and nodding rather than anything smarter or more savage, its targets just and understandable – motherhood is hellish, husbands are thoughtless, wider society is misogynistic – but its overly didactic methods repetitive and ineffectual.
Adams at least gets to have more fun than usual, playing a one-time artist who stepped back to take care of her son, moving from city to suburbs and swapping exhibiting at MoMA to frying frozen hash browns for breakfast. She loves her son deeply but also resents the role she’s now playing, struggling with a loss of identity and agency and sense of self, and failing to bond with the other mothers around her. She’s also finding herself increasingly at the mercy of her anger, something that she had carefully learned to manage and subdue like many women – but with every thoughtless comment from her husband (Scoot McNairy) and every thankless task she’s lumped with, something starts to shift.
Her transformation from mother to dog does not go as deep into the gnarly body horror as the novel, and it’s a neutering that the film struggles with: a gonzo concept that’s left a little tame in execution. Film-makers have long used the horror genre to comment on the violence of birth and the otherness of parenting but the commentary here feels too surface-level and sitcom-y, Heller overusing the daydream format of Adams imagining her reaction, instead of living it. From the knowing laughs at the Toronto film festival premiere, it’s clear that audience members found many of these broad moments relatable – her husband not getting it; these other mothers getting it more than she ever wants to – but there’s a difference between highlighting something that frequently happens and having something incisive to say about it.
It’s not always an even fit for Adams – the more extreme act-like-a-dog moments would be a struggle for most – but it’s a swing, and after slumming it in Oscar bait, that counts for something. It might fail to be as weird as it should or could be but it’s still far weirder than most awards plays this season (the film was moved from a straight-to-streaming Hulu release to theatres with a best actress campaign in mind), and Adams feels more comfortable in this mode than any she has been in since her all-timer of a performance in 2018’s magnificently murky miniseries adaptation of Sharp Objects. It feels as if she’s an actor who could benefit from raising her freak flag a little higher, and I hope this ultimately encourages her to do that more.
But she’s hemmed in by a film that too often feels like a dated one-note sketch, pot shots at the big city and modern art and the basic nature of suburbia having now been made for far longer than the film would like to admit. There also seems to be a quick boredom with the central doggy conceit, pushed to the side for an increasingly sentimental ode to the magic of motherhood instead. There could have been room for both, perhaps, but the light ends up taking over far more space than the dark and Nightbitch, which is after all a film called Nightbitch, needed a nastier, more nocturnal edge. Damn you, Nightbitch.
Nightbitch screened at the Toronto film festival and will be out in US cinemas on 6 December and in the UK and Australia at a later date
