Nightbitch

From taking a single look at Mother (Amy Adams), one might surmise that societal expectations and the myth of having it all have eroded her sense of self to the point of making her unrecognisable to herself. A new suburban mother, Mother remains, technically, an artist, though she feels increasingly unable to refer to herself as such when the only art she’s been able to create in months is the splatter of food and paints loosed upon her house by the newborn. She’s approaching the end of her tether, feeling stifled in a stereotype of 50s housewife-dom while her husband (Scoot McNairy, pitched at the right level of unbearable obliviousness) jets about the country for work. If Nightbitch – the watchable yet bluntly prescriptive new film from Marielle Heller – trusted its audience a little more, much of this could be surmised without words. Instead, telling in place of showing is a vice the feature returns to over and over. It’s one thing for a movie to own its thesis, and another for it to instruct you on everything you ought to be feeling and thinking at all times.

The fact that Heller’s film feels so constrained by the pitfalls of movie messaging – a structure in which things briefly come apart, only to be swiftly amended by the overdue learning of lessons – is all the more disappointing considering its most outlandish sidebar. At night, dogs crowd around Mother’s front doorstep, dispensing gifts of dead rodents. Her own behaviour grows increasingly doglike, to the point of her sprouting a tail, multiple nipples and increasingly sharp teeth. As in the book of the same name by Rachel Yoder, Mother is turning into a canine, in a fashion one is tempted to wish were more literal. As it stands, hers is the most metaphorical of metamorphoses, only intermittently useful to underline a point, instead of grabbing the story by its own collar and leading it into freer, more unruly territory. Some of the early specks of body horror are appreciably disgusting, but Mother’s actual nocturnal run-arounds rather resemble a car commercial about a dog in fervent pursuit of the hot new addition to the automotive market. Instead of embracing its potential for wildness, what Nightbitch opts for instead feels familiar, even non-specific.

Of course, it’s already there in its oh-so-allegorically named leads, broadly standing in for Mother and Husband everywhere. Over an oddly long-feeling 98 minutes, Nightbitch’s characters never attain the honest, even unpleasant humanity of Melissa McCarthy and Richard E Grant’s amateur forgers in Heller’s own Can You Ever Forgive Me? Her latest ultimately feels too didactic, too determined to leave the audience with a tidy sense of uplift to offer what feels like a truly unfiltered portrait of under-discussed experience. Still, Adams’s performance hints at the more brittle, unfettered version of the movie that remains hidden from view. Often, she seems to be spoiling for a fight, and one only wishes the film around her were too.

Thomas Messner

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Watch the trailer for Nightbitch here: