Nightbitch: Film Review
Amy Adams has been on a lacklustre run of late – Hillbilly Elegy, The Woman in the Window etc – and it seemed unlikely Nightbitch would turn her fate around, given the wild concept. The film will not appeal to everybody but there’s no denying that she gives one of her best performances in years.
She plays an unnamed stay-at-home mum who is mourning her old life and her loss of identity as an artist after giving up her job to be with her son (played by twins Arleigh and Emmett Snowden) full-time. While she loves her son, she can’t stand the monotony, the exhaustion and the lack of adult company and is resentful of her husband (Scoot McNairy) as his life has barely changed. Here’s the wild concept: Her body starts changing in odd ways and she thinks she may be slowly turning into a dog.
This is one of the most honest and realistic depictions of motherhood I’ve ever seen on screen. It confronts the notion that mums must love being a parent and can’t express dark thoughts and regrets. The film establishes our lead’s mental state from the get-go with Adams giving a taboo-smashing stream-of-consciousness monologue to a fellow mum in a supermarket and follows this up with a cleverly edited montage that illustrates the monotony of her days. It sounds like it’s going to be a depressing watch but it’s actually pretty funny at times.
I liked some of the voiceovers of Adams espousing the trials of motherhood but there were a few too many and they were sometimes a bit too on the nose. We already have a good idea of her internal life at this point. Marielle Heller achieves this by having Adams say something brutally honest or controversial and you don’t know if it’s a thought in her head or if she actually voiced it out loud. It’s fun waiting for other people’s reactions!
While the film nailed the motherhood angle, I wasn’t sure what to make of the light body horror where she starts turning into a dog. It’s a very weird concept and Adams grounds it in reality as much as possible, but it’s hard to reconcile the dramatic and magic realism elements. Perhaps Heller could have pushed this idea further and gone darker and crazier with it.
This film will definitely appeal to women (specifically mothers) more than men. However, I think the husband in this film is depicted quite accurately. He’s not made a villain – he’s just a man who doesn’t realise how much his wife has given up and how hard it is to look after a child every day. This causes internal rage and resentment because she needs help and a fairer balance of responsibility. McNairy gives a compassionate and nuanced performance and I felt for him too.
Adams does fantastic work channelling her character’s anger, exhaustion and frustration and throwing herself into the weird and fantastical elements. Nightbitch is worth a watch for her excellent performance alone.
In cinemas from Friday 6th December