‘Nightbitch’ Is More of an Idea Than a Movie

Marielle Heller’s evocatively titled new film Nightbitch unfolds at times like an essay film. Based on Rachel Yoder’s acclaimed novel, Amy Adams stars as a mother who, struggling with overwhelming parental duties and frustrations about the world she left behind, starts turning into a dog. (I haven’t read the book, which has been called a satire, a fairy tale, a magical realist fable, a horror story, and more.) Adams narrates her transformation with alternating omniscience and doubt. Sometimes she stands above the fray, expounding on the cosmic ironies of being a woman with dreams who shunted them all aside to have a baby. And then sometimes she wonders aloud if maybe she’s a terrible mother for worrying about any of this.

That queasy positional balancing act occurs throughout Nightbitch, and Adams, whose button-cute sweetness always seems to hide a deep intelligence, is ideally suited for both sides of the see-saw. “You light a fire early in your girlhood,” Mother, who was once an up-and-coming artist, intones in lines taken straight from the novel. “You stoke it and tend it. You protect it at all costs…You keep it secret. You let it burn.” And then, she adds, you give it all up for “a person who will one day pee in your face without blinking.”

This isn’t a tract against motherhood, however. Heller’s montages of Mother’s repetitive days walk a fine line between the pulverizing reality of endless sizzling hashbrowns and messy playtimes and the profound love between parent and child. Her toddler (played by twins Arleigh Patrick Snowden and Emmett James Snowden) is adorable, and the film embraces that: We understand why Mother gave up everything to care for this tiny, vulnerable human, even as we also understand that she’s dying inside. Again, Adams brings that right mix of tenderness and annoyance, between holy wonderment and existential boredom.

As for the whole dog thing: It’s more a metaphorical grace note than a true narrative throughline, though Heller does give us intermittent bits of body horror and lots of shots of her protagonist’s dog-self running through the streets of both suburbia and New York City. Maybe metaphorical is the wrong word. Rather, the dog is the expression of how motherhood is, fundamentally, an intensely natural process growing out of the violent, animalistic fact of childbirth. We cover it up in our culture with luminous images of softness and kindness, but at heart it’s a fearsome, beastly thing. (Hell, those early months and years of parenting even turn many of us dads into animals, and we generally don’t have to do the whole giving birth part.)

This overarching meditative quality of Nightbitch is at once its most intriguing element and its greatest shortcoming. Mother’s gradual transformation should give the movie a sense of movement, but because it’s held at a remove, tedium sets in. Basically, there’s no real story here. Which wouldn’t be a problem if the film didn’t keep trying to give us one. Beyond Mother’s possibly-symbolic nocturnal roamings, it also outfits her with a coterie of other youngish moms whom she perceives as somehow beneath her, but who, of course, will turn out to be not that unlike her. It’s an interesting idea, but we don’t see much of these people. They never become characters; they graduate from punchlines to sisters in an instant, more to work a theme than to really engage us. Mother’s husband, Father (Scoot McNairy), is a milquetoast who travels all the time and disingenuously loves to say that he would happily give everything up to spend more time at home with his wife and kid — and it’s only a matter of time before he realizes how hard parenting is and changes his ways. Again, he seems more like a Point than a character.

Again, none of these things would be a problem if the movie fully embraced its own abstraction. There’s a weak, Hollywood-friendly structure here of lessons learned and conflicts resolved, but beyond Mother’s insular world of ambition and longing and stasis, nothing has been fleshed out in a way that supports the story. The film perches itself between projection and reality — it’s full of those by-now cliché little projections where a character imagines herself doing something violent to somebody before revealing that, no, she didn’t really do that at all — so that we never quite know if what we’re seeing is fact or not. So the movie goes in circles, constantly expounding on the same things. It has lots of insight, but little momentum. Then again, maybe that’s the idea.