The best moments of Nightbitch expose the disturbing and raw truths of parenthood which is an exceedingly faithful representation of the reality of being a parent but unfortunate moments arise when certain moments of the movie are over-the-top in a fashion that doesn’t align with how the story has previously unfolded making it complicated for the viewer to comprehend. This further compounds the already weak conclusion which utilizes a fairy tale climax that is quite contrarily intertwined with what the core of the film wishes to convey. While watching Nightbitch, it sort of felt like I just watched two different movies one that depicted a realistic take on marriage and parenting while the other one uses a butterfly as a nose in a poor attempt at satire.
Maybe this whole craziness is intentional. I wonder if director Marielle Heller sought to create this image of Amy Adams on all fours, crawling and yapping like a dog, to mark the movie with trashy flavor which I am sorry to say probably sinks the film’s rating to that of Ed Wood. Maybe it will work for some of those in the audience, but I’m not among them. There are scenes – principally those that show the impact of the stress of being a stay-at-home parent and how it can breed resentment and anger – that ring true. Then along comes a sequence in which Adams does things no serious actor should be expected to do. However, This kind of impression is not necessarily the best impression one can hope to achieve.
Adams plays the “Mother” who remains unnamed and is unable to stand her life as a housewife, which she believes she was not made for. From within herself, she has managed to capture a lot of resentment – first at her husband (Scoot McNairy), a businessman who has virtually left her alone for too long, second for successfully winning over her career as an artist just to sit back and babysit her toddler son (Arleigh and Emmett Snowden), and finally at the mundane life that a housewife is expected to carry out. But anger is the most primal of emotions and moves across the scale of humanity fluidly as is the case with Mother she eventually takes on a rather monstrous form. Her physical appearance starts to slowly evolve into that of a dog as on one of the nights, she turns into a were-dog instead of a werewolf and starts to live with a pack of dogs who had an affinity towards killing. Domestic creatures were her new prey including rats, cats, and possums.
It is easy to predict that the narrative would be much better as a text work than an adaptation. I haven’t examined the book, which was written by Rachel Yoder in 2021, but the degree of mystical realism (in this situation, it’s werewolves) that is the genetic coat of a film’s narrative, is lost when the fantasy of books (which uses more images) is shifted to movies (where everything is visual) or vice versa. And, even if Nightbitch is confident that what they’ve created is a comedy (and this is the case, thanks to burning satirical elements in the film), there are a few too many times when we’re laughing at night bitch instead of it.
Some of the ideas of the film are not new, however, this does not take away from their impact. Marielle Heller’s screenplay depicts the enduring frustration of certain ladies who are – against their will – forced by their families or societies to actively participate in recreating the race. The heroine is a woman who is in a situation and she is angry that all such sacrifices, it would appear, are not being made by her husband, but he does not even understand the reality.
One scene that best summarizes this dynamic is the husband staying in another room to play video games while the wife on the other hand is lying in bed trying to soothe their active son to slumber.
Nightbitch was supposed to be released on Hulu straight off the bat but the producers took a last-minute decision to give it a brief worldwide release so that Adams could be nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress. Was this performance enough to win an award? In the more mundane scenes, however, Adams is quite good. She gets the character, she can convey a wide variety of emotions, sometimes too many that Mother embodies. However, when she appears as herself in Night Bitch, the most prominent picture of her in my head is that of her on all fours barking like a dog, which is not very flattering. Maybe it was daring to do so but in the end it was an unnecessary effort. It is almost as if it is taken from a scene of Monty Python.
The notion of women looking like dogs might seem convincing to some however the ending of this flick is ineffective since it distracts from the main objectives which are serious. Nightbitch and others in similar genres don’t have the luxury of suspension of disbelief curve working in their favor. They have to take the viewer to a different world and keep him there. The middle part is artificial to the extent that, like all the apps in which Adams appears on his fours, it takes the viewer out of the whole experience. It is a titillating title but the rest of the film unfortunately did not measure up.
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