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.

I Saw the TV Glow (2024)

Originally published in Wildcat Weekly on November 22, 2025

 

Anyone who’s ever gotten into a show or received a mixtape can find something in I Saw the TV Glow.

For half of the film, Owen and Maddy (Justice Smith and Brigitte Lundy-Paine) are unlikely teenage friends bonding over a supernatural TV series called The Pink Opaque. Neither one fits in at their suburban high school; this one shared interest bonds them. That their interest features silly dancing baddies, fro-yo monsters, and pink glowing tattoos is beside the point. The show’s fictional midnight realm is their anchor to the real world.

The other half of the film challenges my adjective “real”. Is their show actually their past? Are Tara and Isabel characters on the Young Adult Network or proxies for Maddy and Owen? Who actually is Maddy and who actually is Owen? Years later, when the two reunite, fact and fiction blur into a surrealist slurry of neon pink nineties nostalgia and abject terror over what’s underneath each character’s surface.

Marketed by A24 as an intellectual horror film, I’m selling it to you as a mystery. After four watches and hours of discussion and rumination, that feels like the fairest pitch. I Saw the TV Glow is arthouse fare where the color of the giant tarp matters. This won’t be to every person’s tastes; for some, its cilantro will taste like black-light soaked soap.

But the mysteries in Jane Schoenbrun’s film beg to be unraveled. Viewers will hypothesize over the surface-level mysteries of what happened and what’s real, but the true mysteries are deeply personal. This is a film about transformation but also the tragedy of fearing transformation. At one point, Owen says “It feels like someone took a shovel and dug out all my insides,” but that somber self-awareness isn’t authentic—he’s too afraid to look inside himself and discover he’s buried something his entire life. But what could it be?

If this all sounds a bit cryptic, that’s my presentation, not the movie’s. Even if you don’t recognize the tarp’s colors, the film wears its metaphors like a glowing pink tattoo. Characters tell you what’s really happening; they talk about TV shows and industrial freezer hearts, but that’s Schoenbrun varnishing the film with a popular media finish. Ultimately, this is a surrealist story about an old teen TV series, but it’s also a highly personal story about the treacherous veering path to self-acceptance some among us traverse.

I Saw the TV Glow probably isn’t a film to throw on while digesting turkey, but nobody wants or needs my help identifying crowd pleasers. This is a gorgeous, challenging film to inspire introspection and empathy. No film from 2024 has stuck with me more than this one.

No film from 2024 begs to be shared more, either.

 

Conclave (2024)

Originally published in Wildcat Weekly on November 8, 2024

As the facilitator at Diamond Day, I need to believe that powerful, transformative change can happen in a singular confined space. I tell the participants that we want the day to feel like a day apart from school and the rest of their lives. I call it a bubble; what’s learned there leaves there, but what’s said there stays there.

 

Released two weeks ago, director Edward Berger’s Conclave traces its story around a similar principle. Substitute the generously-shared small gym for the musty annals of the Vatican and you have your tight quarters; instead of 140 students, staff, and alumni, drop in 110 Cardinals gathered together to vote for and elect a new Pope.

 

Like Diamond Day, Conclave is full of twists and turns. You can feel the foundation being laid for unexpected intrigue in both. At Diamond Day, it’s the interjected “If you really knew me” phrasings and the emotional hiccups that crop up out of nowhere. In Conclave, its the factions forming and whispered questions. Did the Pope fire him? Who appointed that Cardinal? Who paid for her flight? At Diamond Day, I as facilitator must stay ahead of the proceedings, anticipating needs and adjusting intended sequences; in Conclave, someone is always seemingly ahead, turning the crank, but it’s never clear who—and when it is, control lurches suddenly. The clergymen voting, squabbling, and backstabbing are nearly all old, wrinkled, and gray, but they connive like men half their ages.

 

Granted, that last bit severs the tenuous parallel I’ve cast between our wellness workshop and a film about church leaders grasping for power. Really, there’s no reason to connect the two at all: our tie-dyed shirt bears little resemblance to the cardinals’ cassocks, and our goal is empowerment for all rather than for elevating one purportedly “reluctant” man to the papacy. They’re fundamentally different.

 

Except for one thing. When students attend Diamond Day for the first time, they often have no idea what’s coming. One student last year confessed to thinking it was all-day homework help; another was certain we’d be playing soccer. When they sit down in their folding chairs, they have no idea what they’re about to see, hear, or feel.

 

That part resembles Conclave. I watch a lot of movies, and I think a lot about story structure; I relish anticipating the progression of any film, show, or novel I jump into. During the second half of Conclave, you can feel the thing building to something as Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, and the rest of the cast ratchet up their frustration and paranoia—but you can’t tell when or how the shoe will drop. The story keyed me up as much as any action movie despite the screen being dense with creaky-kneed elder statesmen in cumbersome garb. I expected light intrigue and some behind-the-hymns glimpses of the Vatican in a stodgy drama, but I watched a pulpy thriller on-screen.

 

Conclave won’t be for everyone, especially with the way the story uses real issues affecting real people as glorified props for its characters’ posturing, and some will prefer the globe-trotting rush of The DaVinci Code or Angels and Demons over the claustrophobia of Berger’s film. But I had a great time learning about this world and its players. Watching them tear one another down in the name of the Church entertained me.

 

Again, that’s very different from Diamond Day, but still: while the workshop scratches an emotional itch, Conclave aims for the entertainment spot.

 

And delivers.

Arrival (2016)

 Originally published in Wildcat Weekly on October 11, 2024

…once.

 

My one time was on Thursday, November 24, 2016, which was Thanksgiving. I went with my sci-fi-obsessed family to an Amy Adams movie about aliens. The film disoriented me, blanketing over extraterrestrial thrills and international intrigue with a thick filter of indie haze and random clips interjected regularly, but it gripped me because the alien story is actually a story about linguistic problem-solving and brilliant people immersed in their process fascinate me. Directed by Denis Villeneuve, now the hotshot auteur behind Dune, Arrival wears its limited budget well thanks to strong performances from Adams and Jeremy Renner. It’s a grounded and ponderous take on first contact.

 

When the movie ended that night and we walked out to the car, I said nothing. Unlike every other holiday evening at the cinema we’d done, I had no questions, I made no observations, and I offered no feedback. Arrival, then and now, felt instantly foundational, like something that had always been in the fabric of me. I spent the drive home on my phone, pre-ordering two copies of the film on DVD. Already, I understood Arrival would be one I needed to share.

 

Which confirms that there’s something more to Arrival than merely a story about a lady talking to aliens. I can’t be more specific because that would threaten your experience. I turned on the film Saturday morning, and it took only a few notes of the Max Richter piano piece that opens the film to have its totality bubble to the surface. It had been several years since I last watched it, yet I knew every machination of the script. Still, my lack of surprise robbed nothing: I felt the film more powerfully than ever before. It’s fundamental that way. I won’t decode why for you—just report the most important piece of advice I have for your viewing:

 

You can only watch Arrival from beginning to end…