Amy Adams has got that dog in her. She is Mother. Mother — that’s the only name or title Amy Adams’ character is granted in Nightbitch, a domestic drama about a woman who gives up her career and buys into the Cult of Motherhood.
The maternal struggle is personal and universal. Millions of parents can relate every day. Parenting is hard. As a director Marielle Heller continues to be a steady purveyor of intimate stories about human relationships drawn from empathetic reveries.
Nightbitch is based on the 2021 novel of the same name by Rachel Yoder. It’s a good yarn. What the book aptly captures is the alienation of motherhood. How alone someone can feel when their entire identity shifts from being someone for themselves to caring for a small human. How they become more like a mothering pack animal and less like an equal partner in a relationship. The occasional transformation between mom and dog earns more purchase on the page, can be read with more symbolic clarity than when it’s very literally translated to the screen.
Magical realism requires a delicate touch. Marielle Heller is a skilled director, using the camera to convey empathy through her visual storytelling. Usually that works out because she is an honest filmmaker. Nightbitch may require more than honesty, as it cannot be plainly adapted to the screen without locating the interiority of the novel with more creative visual methods. While the movie portends to capture that much nuance and sets it up well initially, it cannot properly finish what it’s started and the conclusions it arrives at feel unearned as a consequence.
The line on Amy Adams is that she’s desperate for an Academy Award. That seems unfair. So what if she is? She’s a very talented actress. She can sell anything, even being a dog. The actress seems to be punished by the audience for having a remarkable career arc where she didn’t win and now having a slump of okay-ish movies where she’s also not going to win. Likewise, Marielle Heller makes nomination friendly movies. Can You Ever Forgive Me (2018) is tremendous and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019) oozes compassion. Nightbitch is a near-miss. Let’s not punish women for doing good work.
The problem is that Nightbitch is a great premise that never becomes a great movie. It repeats the same note. Motherhood is so hard. The pain behind the concept is existential and burning in its truth. Then the movie proceeds to say this same thing repeatedly until it dives into a forced conclusion. Some of the interplay between Amy Adams’ Mother and Scoot McNairy’s Husband is sharply crafted, but the film offers little else to anchor the story. Nightbitch critiques the Cult of Motherhood and pairs well thematically with 2018’s Tully. Yet, it never fully realizes the potential of adapting the deeply interior novel, settling instead for honest but surface-level exteriority.