NIGHTBITCH (TIFF 2024) – Review by Rachel West
Marielle Heller’s messy adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s best-selling novel Nightbitch can’t be saved by Amy Adams.
The unnamed Mother (Amy Adams) is having a tough time with motherhood. She’s given up her career to be a stay-at-home mom and caregiver to her young son while her husband enjoys frequent work trips. She’s angry, exhausted, and thinks she might be turning into a dog at night. An odd and quirky premise to be sure, Heller’s adaptation has no bite, inexplicably leaning more into comedy territory than one might expect, especially if you’ve read the source material.
Days spent alone as a single parent are driving the once-successful modern artist to madness. She feels like a shell of her former self when the idea of becoming Nightbitch – a carefree dog who eats what she wants and runs free through the neighbourhood – takes over her every being.
Yoder’s novel is a free-flowing inner monologue of Mother’s thoughts. Here Heller, who adapted the novel for the screen, has Adams narrate her every thought matter-of-factly, breaking the fourth wall to communicate with the audience. Her Husband (Scoot McNairy) is inept and as helpless as their son, exasperating her to no end, even though there is still some love left in their marriage.
Adams is just fine as Mother delivering a performance that is neither memorable nor remarkable when stacked against her filmography. Despite being the main focus with plenty of material to work with, Mother feels underwritten and two-dimensional. The script reigns her in more than it should, never letting the dirty and complicated aspects of being a Nightbitch truly take hold. It feels like a cop-out and not as subversive as a movie that sees a woman physically transform into a dog should be. It does nothing to explore how stay-at-home moms are devalued in society but their peers and partners or how detrimental motherhood can be to mental health. Though they both yearn to claw back, Mother and Nightbitch are trapped in the same patriarchal society that keeps them caged.
Perhaps most off the mark is the film’s attempt at humour, it’s oddly zany which belies the true subject matter at hand: being a mother is hard work. By wrapping it into a feel-good package, it does the entire film a great disservice. Heller set a high bar for herself with the excellent Can You Ever Forgive Me and Won’t You Be My Neighbour, so it’s a shame that Nightbitch feels so out of her grasp. For such a bizarre story, the film feels mundane and derivative, borrowing far more than expected from tired family comedies. With so much potential and buzz ahead of its release, Nightbitch is one of the year’s most disappointing films.
