Cast: Amy Adams, Scoot McNairy, Arleigh Snowden, Emmett Snowden
Genre: Dark Comedy, Body Horror
Director: Marielle Heller
In Irish Cinemas: 6th December 2024
Marielle Heller’s provocatively titled new film, Nightbitch, often unfolds with the reflective tone of an essay film. Adapted from Rachel Yoder’s acclaimed novel, the story centres on Amy Adams as a mother grappling with the suffocating weight of parental responsibilities and the lingering ache of life and identity she left behind. As her frustrations intensify, she begins an unsettling transformation—both physical and psychological—into a dog. Adams narrates this metamorphosis with a voice oscillating between sharp omniscience and self-doubt. Sometimes, she steps outside her experience, reflecting on the cosmic absurdities of being a woman who sidelined her ambitions to embrace motherhood. At other times, she questions herself, wondering if her yearning for a different life makes her an unfit mother.
This delicate balancing act—between clarity and unease—permeates the film. Adams, with her innate ability to pair surface-level charm with profound emotional depth, is an ideal conduit for these tensions. Her performance captures the complexity of a woman torn between the smouldering remnants of her aspirations and the relentless demands of caregiving.
Lines drawn directly from Yoder’s novel underline these themes with poetic force. “You light a fire early in your girlhood,” the Mother, once an ambitious artist, reflects. “You stoke it and tend it. You protect it at all costs…You keep it secret. You let it burn.” But then, with a bitter edge, she admits the ultimate irony of this sacrifice: “You give it all up for a person who will one day pee in your face without blinking.”
Heller’s Nightbitch captures these contradictions with unflinching honesty, vividly exploring motherhood, identity, and the primal instincts lurking beneath the veneer of domestic life.
This isn’t an indictment of motherhood. Instead, it’s a nuanced exploration of its duality. Heller’s montages of Mother’s repetitive days strike a delicate balance between the grinding monotony of endless sizzling hashbrowns and chaotic playtimes and the profound, soul-deep love between parent and child. Her toddler (played by twins Arleigh Patrick Snowden and Emmett James Snowden) is undeniably adorable, and the film leans into that fact. We see why Mother sacrificed everything to nurture this tiny, vulnerable human. But at the same time, we feel her unravelling, her sense of self slipping away. Amy Adams captures this perfectly, delivering a performance oscillating between tenderness and irritation, holy awe and existential fatigue.
Then there’s the matter of the dog. It functions less as a strict narrative thread and more as a symbolic grace note—or perhaps metaphor isn’t the right word. The dog embodies motherhood’s primal, intuitive nature, a process rooted in childbirth’s raw, animalistic reality. While society cloaks motherhood in images of softness and gentleness, the film peels back those layers to reveal something fierce, even brutal, at its core. Early parenthood, after all, often transforms us into creatures of pure instinct. This is true for mothers who endure the physicality of birth and even for fathers, whose roles, though less biologically demanding, can strip away human polish and expose something deeply feral.
This meditative undercurrent is both Nightbitch’s most compelling aspect and its most significant flaw. Mother’s slow transformation ought to propel the story forward, but the film keeps her evolution at a distance, leaving the narrative stagnant. The result is a story that falters, unsure of its pacing. There’s a sense that the film wants to avoid being entirely plot-driven, but it keeps circling back to fragmented storylines that never quite coalesce.
Take, for example, the group of other young mothers who orbit around Mother. Initially, she dismisses them as bland and unrelatable, but the film hints that they might mirror her struggles. Unfortunately, these characters are underdeveloped, barely transitioning from punchlines to symbolic “sisters” in a way that feels rushed and thematically convenient rather than emotionally earned.
Similarly, Mother’s husband, Father (Scoot McNairy), is more an idea than a fully realised character. He’s the archetypal absentee dad: a well-meaning but clueless partner who pays lip service to parenting challenges while leaving the bulk to his wife. His inevitable epiphany about the hardships of parenthood feels more like a plot device than a genuine moment of growth.
Ultimately, Nightbitch is a film full of intriguing ideas and moments of raw emotional honesty. However, its refusal to commit to an entirely meditative or narrative approach leaves it feeling uneven, and its potential greatness is diluted by its inability to decide what it wants to be.
The film’s shortcomings wouldn’t be an issue if it fully committed to its abstract nature. Instead, it clings to a weak, formulaic structure aimed at Hollywood sensibilities, with obligatory lessons learned and conflicts neatly resolved. Outside of the cloistered world of the protagonist, Mother, where ambition, longing, and inertia dominate, the narrative lacks the depth and detail needed to give the story accurate weight.
The movie teeters on the edge of reality and illusion, often employing now-familiar visual clichés: fleeting, violent daydreams where a character imagines harming someone, only for the moment to dissolve into the “reality” that no such act occurred. These sequences leave the audience unsure of what’s real and what isn’t. Rather than using this ambiguity to drive the story forward, the film meanders in circles, reiterating the same themes and ideas without building on them.
While the film offers plenty of insight, it needs more momentum to transform those insights into a compelling narrative. Then again, perhaps that lack of forward movement is intentional — a deliberate choice to reflect the stasis within the character’s world.
Overall: 6/10
Movie Reviewer
