Movie Review: “Nightbitch” Tells Rather Than Shows

A woman pauses her career to be a stay-at-home mom, but soon her domesticity takes a surreal turn.

There’s so much that goes into adapting a novel. It’s not just the imagery, the plot, and the characters but also the spirit of the book, and it tries to convert something felt through prose into something equally felt through dynamic pictures, sound, and performances. In the case of “Nightbitch,” director Marielle Heller’s adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s book, much can be given to the outlying form of the film, but the film utilizes voiceover to bridge any gaps between the two adaptations. While Amy Adams certainly carries the film on her back with smart performances, the cracks in the project become more transparent, not less so when the wall-to-wall voiceover takes up large swaths of the medium.

“Nightbitch” centers on an unnamed Mother who’s left home alone to care for her son while her husband, Husband, earns the family’s living. Amidst the sea of dirty diapers, sticky fingers, and general chaos of a child, this Mother’s sense of self succumbs completely. She’s living in a 1950s dream of an American household, and as an artist, she has no idea how she got to this domesticity after such a vibrant and active imagination. All this frustration manifests itself as Mother grows more hair, develops a nub at the back of her tailbone, and finds six new nipples along her belly. At night, she dreams of running with the wolves, but she never quite feels herself during the day. Her literal and metaphorical transformation might unlock the missing piece of her identity, and she can finally become the person she’s meant to be.

The film lives in a beautiful grey zone between genres. The laughs and shocks of being a parent, never let up, and a two-year-old toddler make for quite the punchline anytime you need one. The minor body horror of slowly turning into a dog makes up the largesse of the horror, but to call this movie a horror comedy sort of undoes its own intentions. Its meditative monologues and dream sequences make this film a special beast. Amy Adams’ smooth voice distends and languishes from thought to thought, paving over the horror and watering down the jokes. When the movie wants to, it can certainly hit hard. I laughed deeply quite a few times. Still, the movie’s theme drives events more than any one plot event, so it feels more pedagogic at times or poetic at best.

Amy Adams never misses a beat. Her very average Joe life feels wholly lived in, and it helps she’s not sporting Hollywood glamor one bit throughout this movie. She looks, acts, breathes, and feels very much like any one of us does. That gives her room to get weird with it, absolutely. I can see why she took on the role, considering she gets to soft-cry, howl like a mutt, whine, growl, and just about nail every emotion on the planet. She commits to her transformation full stop and never plays it for laughs. Scoot McNairy fills in the husband’s space quite well, never being rude or mean-spirited. In a way, they make a perfect pair of suburban American parents, living in separate worlds yet sharing a bed. I’d be remiss if I didn’t add that Arleigh Snowden really rocks every scene he’s in as a toddler. Shooting a movie with this much of a child is a bold choice (maybe the most daring in the film), given that he’s essentially just playing cute toddler and only occasionally has to cry on demand.

The movie really hones in on Mother’s inner life. We see scenes of what she’d like to say to people and her true feelings. We see her let her freak flag fly when she’s home alone with her son. This interiority might resonate with many mothers who spent their whole lives being told that being a mother is the greatest honor but never learned that motherhood can consume your entire sense of being. I saw many beats that resonated deeply with my parents and friends, things that speak so deeply to that person that I can’t fathom how well they connected. The movie’s best scenes play when the Mother finally connects with other Moms (Zoe Chao, Jessica Harper, Mary Holland, and Archana Rajan, respectively). They’re all too shy to share their inner lives until Adams’ Mother tears down the fence and unleashes the pack, so to speak.

So much of this movie focuses so profoundly on Mother’s inner monologue that I understand the choice to verbalize it. Without Adams’ running commentary, the deeper moments might feel superficial, the comedy might take over, and the truths behind the jokes might get lost. Still, the movie begins and ends with the deepest of monologues, which doesn’t bode well for its intentions. Long chunks of the story take place with Adams driving the narration home with a lengthy epithet or some soliloquy regarding motherhood. So many sections get voiceover its hard not to imagine they lifted entire sections from the book and placed them on top of scenes that would otherwise have felt a bit stilted. The movie needed something subtext to become plain ol‘ text to sell the idea of what’s happening here, which comes at a cost.

What the movie utilizes Adams so well for becomes its crutch. The book must be powerfully magical if the best solution for adaptation is to pile on sections of the original wholesale. The story hits fun beats of comedy and only slightly pokes at horrific scenes, but on the whole, it never feels wildly out of control or uncaged. Instead, it’s portent at showing feminine rage gets the complexity it deserves at the cost of the entertainment it could promise. While I enjoyed sections of the film, the best parts were when women got together, stopped monologuing, and started sharing. The rest of the film languishes in its own atmosphere.

In Theaters Friday, December 6th

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