Director/Screenplay – Marielle Heller, Based on the Novel Nightbitch (2021) by Rachel Yoder, Producers – Amy Adams, Anne Carey, Marielle Heller, Sue Nagle & Christina Oh & Stacy O’Neil, Photography – Brandon Trost, Music – Nate Heller, Visual Effects – Fin Design + Effects (Supervisor – Stuart White), Special Effects Supervisor – Ron Trost, Production Design – Karen Murphy. Production Company – Annapurna Pictures/Archer Gray/Defiant By Nature/Bond Group Entertainment.
Cast
Amy Adams (Mother), Scoot McNairy (Father), Arleigh Snowden & Emmett Snowden (Son), Jessica Harper (Norma), Zoe Chao (Jen), Mary Holland (Miriam), Archana Rajan (Liz), Ella Thomas (Naya), Darius De La Cruz (Lemuel), Stacey l. Swift (Freida)
Plot
A mother is struggling with raising her two-year-old son. She is resentful of having given up her career as an artist to do so. She feels that her husband who is away most of the time on business does not appreciate what her daily struggles take out of her. As her frustrations build, the mother finds herself turning into a dog.
Nightbitch (2021) was a debut novel for US writer Rachel Yoder. It ended up with a host of accolades, including being named Book of the Year by Esquire and Vulture magazines, while Yoder’s website gives a long list of other achievements. The film version is directed/written by Marielle Heller, who was behind films like The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015), Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018), and the acclaimed A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019)
Nightbitch is not a film I would normally sit down to watch – I am not a parent and films rhapsodising about the joys of motherhood do nothing at all for me. On the other hand, I ended up watching for two reasons. One of these is Amy Adams, who I am convinced is one of the finest actresses of the 2010s/20s. The other is the film’s irresistible pitch “overstressed mother Amy Adams finds herself transforming into a dog.”
That Marielle Heller is not conducting another rosy film about the joys of motherhood is immediately evident from the first scene in the film where Amy Adams’ meeting with a former colleague turns into a fantasy where she delivers a wonderfully sarcastic monologue about societal norms and gender expectations and a frustrated desire to make socially pointed artwork. This became the point, just over a minute in, where I was instantly sold on Nightbitch.
Amy Adams as a frustrated mother turned Nightbitch
Indeed, this is the sort of film about motherhood that I can watch – one that sinks its teeth into the rosy sentiments. My viewing companion, herself a mother, was constantly nodding “uh-huh” and laughing at how true to her experience some of the scenes were. It is a fantastically well written script. Some of Amy Adams’ fantasy monologues are side-splitting. Or just casual throwaway lines to husband Scoot McNairy about whether to have sex: “I have eight nipples now and I fear you’ll be repulsed.”
In terms of genre material, Nightbitch is not quite the were-dog film that it announces it is going to be. Certainly, we have scenes where Amy Adams becomes a husky, although there are no scenes with her undergoing a transformation a la An American Werewolf in London (1981) or The Howling (1981). This has led to more than one commentator around the web to label the film as one where the transformation all takes place in her imagination. At the same time, there are scenes where Amy is clearly undergoing some type of physical change – developing hair on her body, a scene where a pus-filled sac at the base of her spine produces a tail – and various other scenes where all the dogs in the neighbourhood are attracted to her or turn up on the doorstep. All of which give the appearance that they are manifestations that are happening in reality rather than imagined. There is the one scene where we see her stomach, which is boasting six additional nipples, although this is immediately followed by a scene where husband Scoot McNairy walks in on her in the shower and fails to notice anything, which does give weight to the interpretation that it is all imaginary.
The main problem is not whether the dog transformation is all in Amy Adams’ mind or not – after all, the classic Cat People (1942) did great things with leaving us uncertain about whether its heroine was transforming or just imagining it – but rather that Nightbitch does not adhere to genre storytelling and follow through on its fantastic premise. A genre-identifying film would have been about the transformation – what it meant to Amy Adams, the advantages it gave her and problems it creates, or quite possibly some type of nemesis introduced. By contrast, Nightbitch is more a film about a frustrated mother with occasional were-dog interludes. It has fun with all the scenes with Amy Adams becoming a dog and exhibiting canine behaviours, but then the last third of the story just drop the dog transformations altogether and progresses to a mundane resolution that is about Amy’s frustrated mothering duties. (And reaches an ending that does buy into the very rosy sentiments about mothering that the early sections of the film so hilariously deflate).
(Nominee for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Actress (Amy Adams) this site’s Best of 2024 Awards).
