Motherhood, according to Amy Adams’s frazzled, unnamed mum to a toddler in Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch, “is perhaps the most violent experience a human can have aside from death itself”. It’s feral, primal and animalistic, an experience that strips away our fastidious qualms and sees us nose-deep in nappies and newly expert in a whole realm of physical indignities. Motherhood, to put it simply, is a beast of a thing – literally, in the case of this odd blend of banal reality and fantasy.
This Amy Adams-starring adaptation of the 2021 novel by Rachel Yoder attempts, not always successfully, to strike a balance between the book’s intellectual curiosity and genre cinema’s inclination to veer towards shock tactics and body horror. There are parallels with films such as Tully and The Babadook in the blurred realities and sense of being gaslit by your own urges and needs, but having identified its allegory for motherhood – Adams’s character finds herself turning into a dog – the picture doesn’t know what to do with it. Nightbitch repeats the same points over and over, like a sleep-deprived new mum attempting to wrestle with a shopping list. Parts of the film work well, the dance of avoidance around marital tensions and festering grievances playing out in Adams’s expressive face. Yet this is hardly revelatory stuff.
Heller (Can You Ever Forgive Me?) seems far more at ease with the domestic drama element than she is with the swerve into absurdist fantasy. Nightbitch would have worked better if it had been pushed further in either direction – as an intimate interrogation, or as a full-bore bestial freakout. This uneasy middle ground feels like a missed opportunity.
In UK and Irish cinemas
