Nightbitch (2024)

Score: 3.5 / 5

Marielle Heller returns to the directorial stool for the first time since the pandemic with Nightbitch, a surprisingly thoughtful and funny riff on modern motherhood. After her sweet, somewhat funny, and deeply meditative A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and Can You Ever Forgive Me?, she has here herself adapted the source material from Rachel Yoder's 2021 novel. Though I've admittedly not read it, the book's buzz indicated to me that a film would be soon forthcoming, though I did not expect it in the form of a wide release direct to Hulu (or produced by Annapurna Pictures and distributed by Searchlight, but everything is changing these days). In her latest, Heller leans more into the darker nature of truth -- Truth, perhaps -- she has long explored in her films, eschewing the realism of her previous ventures to literalize a weirder, more fraught vision of motherhood than we tend to see in mainstream American film.

Amy Adams plays the titular mother -- named only Mother in the credits -- in yet another accomplished and layered performance that has proven her bona fides time and again. Mother has given up her career as an artist to be a stay-at-home mom for her two-year-old son while her husband is constantly away for work. Isolated and resentful, she regularly imagines lashing out at other people, even in passing at the grocery store, which is where we first meet her in a pseudo-fantasy as she meditates in haunting style the impossible pressures placed on her as a woman and a mother in today's society. Heller's screenplay (and, likely, Yoder's novel) takes great pains to articulate the issues involved and to not lean too far in any direction. Mother is clearly unhappy with her body since having a child, and she mentions having let herself go; she misses her career and tries to get it back while not remembering how she was the one determined fit to stay home; she wants to socialize, but she's simply different from the other young mothers and feels painfully awkward.

Amidst all this concern, Mother has one more issue to handle: she's turning into an animal.

Well, not literally. She mentions the title of the film early, in regard to herself, suggesting that by night she's a "bitch," meaning angry and aggressive and sexual and the kinds of things a mother "shouldn't" be. It also means, though, a female dog. Her teeth are starting to get pointy, she's growing patches of hair and the start of a tail, and she starts hunting other animals. In so doing, Adams offers some physical skills we haven't seen from her in a while, and while moments are played for light scares -- there is a Cronenbergian version of this that is straight-up body horror -- or for light laughs, it's clear these elements are metaphoric and only extant in Mother's opinion of and regard for herself.

Apart from its insightful and endearing screenplay, the film does really great technical work. Editor Anne McCabe deserves awards for so economically establishing a rhythm to the repetitive nature of Mother's life as a mother. Additionally, while Son is played by young twins, their performances are really lovely, to the extent we can judge a child for this; more appropriate for accolades here is the editor, who makes Son an endlessly lovable character. Again, there is a version of this film that reads more like The Babadook, making Son a monstrous horror that Mother is obligated to handle daily, and this wisely chooses a different path.

I wanted a clearer reference point to establish Mother's marriage with her husband (Scoot McNairy), because while their dynamic is believable, we are left wondering more about their backstory and their foundational moments -- such as who decided, and when, that she would be the parent at the cost of her career -- by film's end. I could have done without the extensive voiceover narration from Mother, which makes the film feel a bit more like a confessional or overt invitation for post-screening psychobabble discussion; seeing the changes she's undergoing and reading into Adams's wide-eyed reaction would be much more engaging for the audience if we weren't being told as much as we're being shown. Finally, I would have liked more understanding of their financial situation (they mention a nanny, for crying out loud), if only to cement the attempt at realism in the film.

Snippets of instantly believable -- and, surely, relatable for any parent -- scenes are highly effective in enhancing the darkly comedic aspects of parenthood on the brink. Whether you want to call it allegorical or magically realistic, the film leans into its unique weirdness and tonal positivity in ways that maybe aren't wholly groundbreaking (I think of the literalized version of Mother's scenario in Bitch, from 2017) but are never less than engrossing and endearing. I also really love that the film doesn't resort to cynicism or nihilism as the end means or goal for Mother. She doesn't leave the family, kill the child, emasculate the husband, burn down the house, or get institutionalized or imprisoned. Any of those were endings I was expecting. Instead, the film celebrates her efforts to establish herself as an agent of her own empowerment within the structure of her chosen life.