Nightbitch | 2024
Amy Adams in Nightbitch. Photo Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2024 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.
Despite its somewhat provocative title, Marielle Heller's Nightbitch is a strangely straightforward tale of the oft-unseen struggles of motherhood. Amy Adams' unnamed mother is overworked, underseen, and spends her days attending soul-crushing kiddie sing-a-longs at the library when she isn't chasing her paint-covered toddler around the house. She gets little support from her mostly clueless husband and finds herself surrounded by seemingly vapid moms who seem to have turned in their identities the moment their child was born.
She doesn't want to be like those moms; she wants to reconnect with the person she was before motherhood. She wants to pursue the hopes and dreams she once had while maintaining the family she always dreamed of - after all, she's a whole person and not just a mother. These desires lead her to find something animalistic within herself, a kind of primal connection to the very act of being a woman, manifested by quite literally turning into a dog.
Nightbitch gets at something intrinsic about the ways motherhood can change you, how raising children not only changes your life but your physical being. It explores the inequities of parenting and raising children, of reclaiming one's personhood by being both a mother and a fully realized individual, and how societal expectations can lead you to view parenthood as a competition, often without empathy for the struggles of other parents just trying to get by. Still, it just feels so didactic, like America Ferrara's feminism speech from Barbie turned into an entire movie. Director Marielle Heller, usually a much more even hand behind the camera, is painting with an incredibly large brush here, allowing Adams to deliver entire monologues explaining the film's themes in the broadest possible terms. Perhaps this is to make clear the struggles to the fathers in the audience who, like Scoot McNairy's bewildered husband, just don't get it. But it's hard to take Nightbitch’s unsubtle sermonizing seriously in the same year that also gave us Janet Planet, a much more piercing exploration of motherhood's contradictions and struggles.
Adams, for her part, throws herself into the role, but a thuddingly obvious script does her little favors. These themes have been explored with greater thought in films like Tully (2018). While Heller has displayed a knack for picking at thorny truths about human nature in films like A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Nightbitch never feels as transgressive as it clearly wants to be, content instead to use its obvious metaphors to scratch at the surface of its ideas rather than dive into them headfirst.
