Nightbitch

When a title is, as I would put it, as a sledgehammer like Nightbitch, and the premise is generally even more ridiculous than a woman who is so lonely, cut off, and sacrificed in motherhood, that she turns into a dog, one certainly does not wish for a film, which is too restrained.

Yet when it comes to Marielle Heller’s rendering of the 2021 Rachel Yoder novel, though it begins promisingly with colorful humor and fun little pokes at the beginning hints of something strange, it doesn’t quite manage to be provocative enough. Poor Amy Adams, who is all in when it comes to everything that the story throws at her but is let down by the material.

At this point in time, there is hardly a need to quote any such Laura Ashley stereotype on the interpretation of the American woman. Frankly, it is sad to read that a book which has been well received as a feminist fairy tale, which actually had the courage to bring out into the open the unpleasant realities within the often hidden downsides of motherhood, has grown dull teeth.

Yes, it follows a woman who gives hindsight and retroactive explanation to the fracturing of her primal surrender as the last resort in seeking redemption. But the gloomy part is softened by this capacity to virtually promise that no matter what level of strong female indignation she showcases, her affection toward the child will never be questioned.

Screaming in the title of her novel, Nightbitch presents two facets – spatial clarity and sharp imagery during the day and thick ambient low light distortion at nighttime. However, the only thing is that the project requires the bolder Heller who enjoyed the blood-frecked dark humor and the unrepentant harshness of her character in Can You Ever Forgive Me? Instead, the writer-director tempers the whirlwind of confusion far too quickly, as if she has not yet taken off the soothing comfort of Mr. Rogers, whom she lauded in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.

The fusion of horror, romance, and comedy is interesting and rather bears a semblance to Marianna Palka’s 2017 indie horror-comedy Bitch, this time with Jason Ritter and Jaime King, which made an exhilarating beginning but didn’t pan out completely in the end.

The two films aim to take down what is known as the Mommy Culture myth that once you become a mother, the experience of childbirth imbues women with self-sacrificing instincts that can only be satisfied in lavishing total attention to the little people they brought into the world — as though this is all it takes to rewire a woman’s entire genetic structure.

Nightbitch is one of those forty-five-minute movies that clocks just over ninety minutes. It executes its plot in driblets that it skips important plot points like the loss of self and the animalistic need to recover it rendering the almost distressingly trite and simplistic.

It is perplexing why one character who undergoes some form of emancipation and becomes a Husky ripping bunny’s necks off becomes less compelling than her marriage. The Nightbitch film does experiment in body horror for a second before backing away. It is apparent that it is pretty muddled on what it intends to be.

Adams is enough of a draw for one to view it anyway as it offers us a performance where the character’s fears and anxieties are revealed to detail. She has a way of making the audience understand the heroine, who only appears in the credits as Mother, affecting comic turns with expert timeliness.

There was no reassurance in that one could go one step further on such unusual considerations as her experience brought about. Instead, one could feel something slowly complacently rather than shock. Hence the situation, as it is always tagged has its own peculiar twists.

Mother was also active in creating art, namely she made art installations and various sculptures, but later gave it up in order to take care of her son called in the Nightbitch film Baby (sweet twins Arleigh Patrick and Emmett James Snowden) while her Husband (Scoot McNairy) goes to work on shoots that last for days and days. As in Adams’ case, there is no name for the father or son.

The supermarket, witty introductory scene in that cocoon of a homemaker, has Mother a messy frazzled looking, her face is tired and puffy as she’s pushing Baby in a basket only to find her ex-colleague sleekly turned out in hire-purchase manager who works in her art gallery.

When asked by Mother’s colleague, a woman, how she is, she embarks on rant providing clear evidence that she is fighting a ‘battle of’ sorts against the everyday mother’s chores that are with no sugar, anger and quite a bit of sweetness in her voice amidst the passion.

That puerile rabbit of the other woman states benignly tells us that a good number of the emotions also expressed by the protagonist are for her mouth alone. The same applies to some of the insults, poor hum, what he gets more to tells her, aggravatively acquiescing to some of her growing concerns and trying to understand why and how her husband thinks A wi while telling her happiness is a chance he contradicts himself Yes is a choice.

Later in the narrative, he states he would like to sit with the boy the entire day and not go to work. But when he agrees to help with one of her toddler duties, which was bathing the baby so that an exhausted mother can have a break, he interrupts the mom every few seconds with demands for this and that.

She embodies Mother’s increasing irritation at moments like that with the angry exasperation of a wife overworked and unappreciated by a husband who chooses to ignore the hustle. Yet Adams credits or blames herself for a double burden in any woman’s day-to-day life that of the grind while also trying to inject some levity into it. Nightbitch is even more accurate on the scene where Husband timidly suggests an intimate act: ‘Do you wanna…?’ and is met with an ‘oh God, No.’

Two years after the plot, a child is born, she is attuned to the feelings of being irrelevant, expunged. She is out at a rare night out with her former colleagues from the art world when she catches herself off guard by saying she has honestly turned into “this just a sagging mom without anything including intelligence to contribute in a gathering.”

“Let me guess, what new horrors do you expect me to face today?” Mother dramatically seeks the answers from the bathroom mirror because she was running out of excuses to ignore the strange things happening to her as perimenopausal effects, as distortions have become.

She smells eerily heightened, the angles of her jaws load look sharper, dogs start to get attracted to her in the park, fur patches sprout on her skin, and she is rudely shocked when she squeezes a gland on her body’s shell thinking it is a simple cyst, and again unexpectedly when looking down she is shocked to see unnecessary nipples

The dogs bounding around her place in the night exclude Casanova outlooks, and they are so magical, Nightbitch seems, that they bring her gifts in the form of animal remains. Then one minute she is rolling her neck and whispering in her hand how she would look on all fours, with her going down the street when the rest of her physically joins her, which is great work from the special effects and prosthetics team.

Mother has come under attack, she no longer has any self-definition. This state of affairs is enhanced when she says rather sadly that she is not an artist anymore (“the highest form of silliness, the most annoying occupation one could have”), and so free to be a part of every phase of Baby’s growth that she wishes to be in as an audience.

It is easier to talk oneself into it than to believe. But once she goes out with it, new life and animal, woman and new and ancient time will never be ashamed again: “I will never. I will never. I will never ever ever do it again. I will never forgive myself for sticking my head in a place.” Yes, these scenes contain dangerous pleasure, there is great, raw strength that would do well in the movie to become more of.

It is possible that there were decisions in the editing room that caused the removal of the bizarre, four-legged night flights, however, it is mind-baffling that Heller in such a short time loses interest in the canid allegorical thrust which drives Mother’s self-catharsis.

Nightbitch does not do justice to Adam’s full-throttle embrace of the dualities of the part by lowering her strange and delightful bed and breakfast business into a springboard to help her strike a more fair distribution in the marriage.

As for McNairy, making Husband worry to the point of irritating inattention is something that the actor is careful not overdo so as to turn the character into a total douche. I think some levity is needed because it is a touchy issue, solo Baby duty, which makes it possible for Mother to go back to her craft, is not an easy task, it is hard to admit. All I’m saying is that it seems like a disloyalty to the very reason why this story exists – to redeem Iossif – that this redemption takes such a large portion of the story.

Nightbitch is the kind of film that most of us should feel unconformable when watching yet it seems as if the plot had been constructed that way to please rather than confronts. “Motherhood is fucking cow,” says the main character.

Sorry, keen readers do not feel that way and out of nowhere, in what can be called a wtf? moment and just before the closing credits, no, everything is packed fairly and neatly and there’s peace.

Mother’s memories of her childhood, which seems to have been in a way a rich Mennonite society, contain additional narrative depth that she thought she had stored away, and her dawning empathy to the normalcy of her own mother, who at one point stepped out, albeit temporarily, yet climbed back in, for no reason.

There’s also the mysterious librarian Norma (Jessica Harper) who knows just how Mother feels and suggests that she read a book called A Field Guide to Magical Women. Yet there is a sense that these strands are irritatingly left hanging.

This is however more gratifying than some scenes where she interacts with 3 other practitioners of motherhood during the library’s Book Babies circle led in song by the film’s creative composer and director’s brother Nate Heller.

To this very simplistic thoughtondemans, she mentally scoffs and rolls her eyes as even more than talking for mothers, the bonds of being moms are common enough to make the closest other moms otherwise insufferable to her. Yet when she meets Jen (Zoë Chao), Miriam (Mary Holland) and Liz (Archana Rajan), they drop hints that they may not only be the mothers that they have been assigned.

The scenes which are sarcastic also suggest what a more elaborate and mutinous shoebox-Bubble Sarahsky’s Nightbitch could have been had it developed the fanciful escapades of One Mother on overdrive with a clueless spouse into more multifaceted and edgier critique of the ‘Motherhood’ cage. The title and the initial scenario seem to offer some truly savage thrills, but the film more or less gets neutered.

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