Don Shanahan
Nightbitch, directed by the stupendous Marielle Heller of The Diary of a Teenage Girl and Can You Ever Forgive Me?, opens on what appears to be an innocent encounter between two women at the supermarket. One of them is dressed fairly nicely with on-point makeup and hair. The other is six-time Academy Award nominee Amy Adams, going full frump with leisure wear, not a speck of makeup, and predominantly unkempt hair out in public lugging around her busy toddler son. The put-togther woman remarks to Adams’s nameless character how it must be so wonderful to be at home with her son all the time. The mother’s response is an uncorked diatribe that starts like this:
That’s a good question, but it’s complicated, though, because I would love to feel content, but instead I feel like I’m… just stuck in a prison of my own creation where I torment myself until I’m left binging Fig Newtons at midnight to keep from crying.
Yeah. She said it and, as a married husband of a mother of two, I (and her) detect no lies. But Adams wasn’t done to begin Nightbitch. With an “and,” she continues to the other woman as the camera keeps a slow zoom moving towards the speaker:
And I feel like societal norms and gender expectations and just plain old biology have forced me to become a person that I don’t recognize, and I’m just angry all the time—like all the time.
There it is. Now, it’s boiled over. Resentment and anger has entered the chat. With a new breath and sentence, that anger morphs to the sad realization within Adams that the hostility she feels has no place to go. She pushes that feeling down to end in a self-deprecating fashion:
I’d love to drive my artwork to be a critique of the modern day systems that articulated this, but my brain just doesn’t function the way that it did before I had the baby, and I’m dumb now. And I’m deeply afraid that I’m never going to be smart or happy or thin ever again.
Bracingly, once again, there’s not a single false thought in the entire Nightbitch monologue filled with doubts and deep-seated anger. A great many mothers operate on this wavelength and face the same dilemmas. The question is whether those concerns are ever voiced and heard. Without a skipped beat after that completed answer, Marielle Heller snaps us back to the other woman’s original remark, and we realize that the rant we just heard and saw never left Adams’s mind. Deferring to decorum, her real answer of “Yeah, I do. I love it. I love being a mom,” dribbles out of her smiling mouth as their carts travel away from each other and reality returns.
From that opening defeatist treatise, Nightbitch forumates its warranted and perturbing soapbox. It’s the introduction of a stump that vaults our motherly main character on a course towards a breaking point. Through Heller bucking stereotypes and predictability, the way this mother will finally act out against the oppressive stresses she holds inside won’t be with Karen-esque explosive words. As hinted by the title, it will darker and more animalistic.
Adams’s mother is a former accomplished painter who gave up her career a few years ago to stay home and raise her son (played by twins Arleigh and Emmett Snowden). She knows these youngest years are limited and important to have, but she feels like the worst mother in the world. Attempting to over-achieve to a degree, our woman cannot help but exhaust herself on a daily basis running through a futile, monotonous, and messy routine of catering to her son’s every need from morning until night. Any assistance and relief is fleeting when her equally exhausted and detached working husband (Scoot McNairy of Argo) comes home oblivious to both the necessary routines for their son and her own needs, rendering him completely unhelpful.
As Nightbitch travels its figurative time loop of the daily mommy grind, little reactions, urges, and actions start to percolate out of our mother. She craves more meat, notices a keener sense of smell, snaps a few more honest retorts, and even audibly snarls at new botherances. An unexpected tuft of lower back hair and slightly sharper canine teeth are noticed next. Maybe it’s the exhaustion. Maybe it’s the suggestion seeing the horde of local dogs at the park nearby where he son plays. Maybe it’s precisely the heavy-handed allegory that comes with the mother calling herself a “nightbitch,” but our lady is reverting dramatically to an animalistic state.
Nightbitch runs with its metaphor and turns it into a liberating odyssey for Adams’s protagonist. Her research into her intensifying condition brings a sage new acquaintance in the form of the librarian Norma (original Suspiria star Jessica Harper). The mother’s increasingly outward frankness attracts and inspires a trio of previously unwanted and unfriendly fellow mothers (Happiest Season’s wild card Mary Holland, TV actress Archana Rajan, and Zoë Chao of Somebody I Used to Know). Best of all, her new attitude is making authoritative headway with her rambunctious son and lazy husband.
True to form, every metaphor or allegory spun in magical realism like Nightbitch tends to have a matching moral. Heller favored and took the thorny and damaging path in adapting Rachel Yoder’s 2021 best-seller, complete with dark humor, existential dread, and enough dashes of body horror to raise eyebrows and drop jaws. Yet, behind the shock value lies strong realizations for becoming a woman and the different outcomes, energies, and roles that come with that plateau of adulthood. Motherhood undoubtedly changes women. Dreams can be found, lost, and found again at various stages of life, where no route is ideal or perfect, even the most carnal or instinctual one.
Continuing the immense commitment-to-the-bit she has demonstrated her entire career in both comedic and dramatic roles, Amy Adams runs with every one of Nightbitch’s surreal twists and turns in an incredible physical and emotional performance, worthy of another ticket to the Oscar soiree. Through enormous effort, she balances the fierce intensity of Heller’s narrative with the draw of underlying sensitivity that generates tangible empathy. No angle is too outlandish and no risk is too great to try. Very few actresses could take on this type of role and pull it off quite as convincingly and freely as she does.
