The bittersweet bitch that is motherhood receives a full-throated howl in this darkly funny adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s 2021 novel. It’s a bitchin’ ode to motherhood with a career-best performance by Amy Adams. You’ll want to hug your mom after seeing Nightbitch.
Adams stars as a nameless mother who wrestles with the realization that parenthood isn’t the joy she thought it would be. Her son (played by Arleigh Patrick Snowdon and Emmett James Snowdon in a pair of terrific turns) is hitting the terrible twos and she’s getting tired after the dull cycle of routine. Cooking hashbrowns, changing diapers and pouring increasingly healthier glasses of wine, parenting doesn’t fulfill her the way her former career as an artist and curator did. She’s going to the dogs.
The mom embarks on her latest creative pursuit, however, when she recognizes changes in her body. She has new hair. Her canine teeth are sharper. Scents seem stronger. And, as her husband notes, she’s turning into a real bitch in bed at night.
Embracing her new identity as “Nightbitch,” the mother approaches parenthood with newfound abandon. She dispenses with all the rules and order to emphasize a sense of play. She embraces her growing animalistic urges and encourages her boy to do the same.
As Nightbitch retreats from the stereotypical suburban mom role, boldly avoiding the yoga moms at story time, she develops a newfound cadre. Dogs, who drolly resemble the trio of humans eager to befriend Nightbitch, keep showing up at her doorstop. They bring gifts, like dead rats, squirrels, and possums. They inspire Nightbitch to get down in the dirt, wiggle her tail, and satisfy her urge for fresh meat.
Heller crafts Nightbitch as something like a werewolf movie. New sensations pop up in her body while she finds a new psychology to see the world anew, especially at night. Adams goes full canine in a midnight metamorphosis. Running through the streets, the mother becomes a truly magnificent bitch as her beautiful fur shines in the moonlight as she runs on all four paws with bracing freedom.
Nightbitch nimbly walks a complex sense of wicked humour as it goes to very dark places. Heller, for one, has a lot of fun exploring the stagnation of Nightbitch’s marriage. The husband (Scoot McNairy, a master of deadpan humour here) irks his wife with platitudes, mansplaining, and a generally outdated sense for gender roles. “I’d kill to be able to study home with him all day, ” the husband says to Nightbitch. She growls, hungry to escape.
The exhaustion on Nightbitch’s weary face contrasts sharply with her well-rested husband, who, fresh and frowsy, can’t look up from his video games to attend to their pup’s needs. Which are plentiful.
Heller harnesses other elements of Yoder’s novel, like Nightbitch’s escapist responses to “real world” events. She barks out her inner desires, responding with deadpan wit as the husband, say, treks her that happiness is a choice, or the mom parade eggs her on to do “mom shit” like his, yoga, and girls’ nights of being white girl wasted.
Nightbitch deftly mixes body horror and magical realism to aid the suspension of belief one requires for the zany ride. Heller also makes a smart choice to tone down Nightbitch’s animosity towards her cat. The dog versus cat rivalry remains as Nightbitch grows restless with her old kitty the more her canine urges overtake her, but Heller’s adaptation understands and respects its audience. The cat, simply put, has a truly brutal death in Yoder’s book that’s so graphic and needlessly cruel that I nearly stopped reading it. Instead, Heller recognizes that some people’s children do have fur, four paws, and a tail. The cat doesn’t get off easy in the film, either, but its fate is easier to stomach with the empathy Yoder affords the cat. Fellow childless cat people, rejoice, for Nightbitch is the one film that truly gets you.
Heller’s adaptation admittedly softens Yoder’s book, especially the ending, which is perhaps an unfilmmable feat in a Hollywood movie, but she also makes some smart choices. Gone is a subplot in which Nightbitch imaginatively identifies with an academic who pens a book about women with animal traits. Instead, Heller favours Nightbitch’s memory bank as she recalls the sacrifices her mother made for her. She thinks of the day her mom said she gave up the chance to be a singer in Europe to be a mother. These memories reveal Nightbitch’s internalized sense of sacrifice, such she shakes free like a dog shedding its coat of water after using a dip. Every frame, kooky as it is, exudes a sense of gratitude for the women who raise us, and the choices they make, the changes their bodies undergo, and the things they give up so their kids can thrive.
It would also be tough to believe that Amy Adams, the nicest actor on the planet, could hurt a fly. And yet she commands every minute of Nightbitch with a masterfully fearless performance. She latches on perfectly to Heller and Yoder’s brainwave to dance the razor’s edge of wicked black humour. This is a bold, go for broke performance of ferocious hunger, heart, and humour. It’s also a tricky physical feat as Adams embellishes the mother with palpable exhaustion while in mom-mode, but also canine-like agility as Nightbitch. The performance is a note-perfect combination of vulnerability, darkness, and warmth. Nightbitch simply wouldn’t work without this performance. Adams is so bold that, as shed noted at the TIFF premiere, she scared the ensemble of dogs on set–no easy feat considering these are some of the best pooch performers in ages.
Yes, you’ll want to hug you mom after seeing Nightbitch. But anyone leaving the theatre who hasn’t raised children may feel reassured with their choices.
