Friday, January 3, 2025

Nightbitch (2024)

As much as any movie I can remember, Nightbitch wanted to rip my throat out.


Maybe that’s appropriate.


That Amy Adams’ character has no name beyond “Mother” telegraphs Nightbitch’s bent. Adams plays the exhausted mom at the film’s center. The former high-brow artist totes her toddler son to storytime and keeps him from electrocuting himself with a fork. She’s frazzled, she’s harried, and she’s pissed. Her working husband’s job necessitates travel, and he’s useless in parent mode.


And she tells us as much. Over and over, Adams reads dialogue or plays out fantasies of spewing philosophic all over those who cross her. If you told me Nightbitch was adapted from a blog or first-person novel, I’d nod and go, “Yep”. Every time Adams talks, the film becomes a blunt instrument of righteous fury. Nightbitch froths at the mouth, daring you to criticize its overclocked protagonist.

 

 

Who also turns into a dog. Maybe. You see, Nightbitch is high-concept that takes its high on the side. Trying to stake some claims about the animalism of motherhood and its violent suppression of humanity, sometimes the film goes body horror, with Adams unfurling a stringy tail from a puss-filled lump above her butt. Another time, she viciously maims the family pet…probably?


For a script that believes its audience incapable of detecting subtly and a Scoot McNairy performance that puts its hand so forcefully on the scale the thing explodes, Nightbitch withholds a lot of answers. Whether the writer/director believes that lends it a hazy surrealism evocative of late-night feedings or because she’s struggling to unite such a diverse and unruly pack of conceits, I’m not sure, but the result is a clunky, jarring, pseudo-magic realist lecture about parental sacrifice.


Contractual obligations dictate that I now acknowledge that I am not a parent and, thus, incapable of comprehending the metamorphosis wrought on the DNA of a woman when she becomes a mom. I watch many movies whose wavelengths I never find, but Nightbitch doesn’t want me on its wavelength. This is a chained-up dog of a film growling at me while I pass its yard. “You’ll never get it,” the film says, glaring at me with murderous canine eyes.


I might believe my lack of motherhood renders me ineligible to offer compassion for what it broadcasts, except I can’t: I’ve watched a film with this message about the fractured identity and eternal apocryphal fatigue of motherhood devastate me. My muse, of course, would be 2018’s Tully, starring Charlize Theron and Mackenzie Davis. In Tully, Diablo Cody’s script engineers empathy with expert precision; like Heller, she champions the gritty dysfunction of parenting by invoking [[SPOILERS]] something akin to magic realism, but every decision has a purpose. I bawled at Tully and thought about my mother’s many sacrifices with lips that quivered until I got home; during Nightbitch, I dared say nothing lest Adams’ character might sic her pack on me.


Which is too bad. Adams remains a magnetic performer, and her stripped-down portrayal here ties imbues every shot with proof of the draining costs of her unpaid labor post-labor. Heller doesn’t trust Adams to let her expressive bloodshot eyes invite us to understand; she’s constantly narrating like the script was lifted directly out of a novel without adaptation. Everything in this script is awkward, sacrosanct, and so aggressively on the wet nose that I looked up the number for animal control. And don’t even get me started on the cartoonish depictions of professional artists (that basically gets thrown out at the end for…reasons).


Admittedly, there was a part of me that thrilled as the film progressed and refused to yield from its “Mothering makes monsters” message. There’d be guts in committing to hostility toward the demands of child-rearing…so of course, the film pauses to insist it’s not the child but the role, as though we hadn’t already repeatedly seen Adams pouring from an empty cup to delight her son. Instead, it buries all of its intensity at the end in exchange for a Milkbone of compromise, communication, and a groveling husband who sees the error in his ways while sweeping a warehouse moments earlier full of moms bonding over the animals they murdered.


Reflecting now, I wonder if this film got chopped to pieces; its 98-minute runtime felt a tad slight for its premise, and there were jarring cuts and suddenly-central characters who leaped from NPC to VIP in a blink. Maybe a more expansive screenplay (or the novel it’s evidently based upon) did more with those extra square inches of canvas. There’s definitely something here because I cried at the end, albeit while certain I was crying because Adams so resembles a brilliant friend who wants to be a mother, and my heart broke thinking about what life bringing life into the world might strangle from her according to this movie.

 

 

Great films can make something specific feel universal, but even mediocre films manage that for me. I enter films wanting to empathize and connect and find personal truth in the story on screen. By that measure, Nightbitch ranks among the worst movies I have watched. Like a wild dog, it took my intended empathy, tore it apart like a wild skunk, and left it on my doorstep to rot.


WOOF.

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