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Nightbitch stars Amy Adams as a mother who is so full of rage about her loss of identity it makes her feral and she starts turning into a dog. It’s weird and there is nothing I can say to make it sound less weird — she grows a tail! Extra nipples! — but it’s actually a more regular and less wild story than you might have imagined. In other words: once you get over the dog, it’s fine(ish). If you can’t get over the dog, forget it.
It is directed by Marielle Heller (Diary of a Teenage Girl, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood) and is an adaptation of the novel by Rachel Yoder. Growing up in a Mennonite community, Yoder saw how her mother had to sacrifice herself and swore that it would never happen to her. But then, one day she realized here she was, with a baby and a husband and she hadn’t put pen to paper for two years. (I learned this by reading an interview with her.)
Adams’s character, who is only ever called “Mother,” has a two-year-old son. She also hasn’t worked since he was born but had been a fishmonger with her own shop and everything. I’m kidding you. She was, is, an artist and gallerist. (Always an artist and gallerist, if not a war reporter; never a fishmonger.) This does not take us into We Need To Talk About Kevin territory. She has bonded with her son but the routine (breakfast, playground, “book babies”) is killing her and she’s lost all sense of self. Who is she now? As her husband (Scoot McNairy) had the more lucrative career it had been decided that she would be a stay-at-home mum. She’s a “nightbitch” because she’s so sleep deprived that if their son cries in the night, as he always does, and Husband doesn’t attend to him, she loses it (quite reasonably). Husband is not a monster. He just doesn’t understand what he’s not understanding. But, still, he is rather oblivious.
She despises the other moms in her suburban area and is lonely, and as she becomes increasingly resentful and furious she starts sprouting hair, then a tail, canine teeth and extra nipples (oh boy), although she never dry humps the furniture, mercifully. It isn’t clear if any of this is really happening or if it’s all in her head, which is annoying if you like things clear cut, as I do. Her sense of smell becomes extraordinary and she starts to crave raw meat and then, at certain moments, she is a dog in its entirety.
This dog looks like a husky-collie mix, and quite a friendly one at that, so it’s not the best metaphor for expressing repressed anger. Are domestic dogs feral enough for what’s hoping to be achieved here? Don’t they basically just hang around for belly-rubs and cheese? Aren’t they as leashed as she is? But the community of Yoder’s childhood was in the Appalachian foothills of eastern Ohio where, I heard in that interview, dogs would drag around deer heads. So that would put a different slant on things.
Putting the dog aside, if you can, this is a basic, three-act affair, the kind of thing screenwriting courses routinely teach as holy writ, but its third act is a let-down and a cop-out. Hence: fine…ish.
The film sets itself up, sometimes heavy-handedly, to say something about society and motherhood but it’s nothing that we haven’t heard before, and it ends in a way that’s surprisingly conventional and corny. (Claire Kilroy does all of this better in her novel, Soldier Sailor.) Still, Adams is wonderfully watchable throughout and I wasn’t ever bored and I’m going to stick my neck out and say: it may be the best film about a woman turning into a dog that you’ll see this year.
