NIGHTBITCH (2024)

A body horror about womanhood, Nightbitch adapts Rachel Yoder’s 2021 novel of the same name and explores the warfare known as motherhood. The film follows Amy Adams, who plays an unnamed stay-at-home mother of an adorable but needy son, whose transformation is more than just psychological.

A former artist, Mother’s life is like Groundhog Day (1993) as she reads the same three books, plays the same games, and navigates dry mummy-and-me classes. Adams’s narration dictates her true feelings as external, as she pretends to be having the best time while internally feeling like she is sinking into quicksand.

Her husband (Scoot McNairy) works away and is praised for doing the bare minimum when he returns home. When she tells him she’s unhappy, he smugly tells her that “happiness is a choice.” The screenplay could so easily turn him into the bad guy, but instead, sympathetically portrays him as a clueless dad unaware that Mother is not having the best time stuck at home with a small child. McNairy is a likeable everyman, which ensures his character is annoying but not unforgivable.

The loss of who Mother was is heightened when she meets other parents at daycare, including Jen (Zoë Chao), Liz (Archana Rajan), and Miriam (Mary Holland). As a creative, the monotonous lifestyle is especially frying her mind, but she finds out she isn’t the only one who feels like that. It’s proof that women speaking up about their own experiences is important and that community is vital for those with children.

There’s a hint that all the sleep-deprived women in mummy-and-me class are in it together, yet no one wants to be the first to speak up about the lies behind the myth of the magic of motherhood. All the women Mother encounters have that hostage look in their eyes as they pretend to be delighted to have given up their careers and sleep schedules to dote on an ungrateful little human.

Nightbitch is driven by Mother’s often very funny internal monologue, which contrasts how she reacts to the world around her. She appears gentle, patient, and wholesome, while internally, she is bubbling with rage and distaste for every moment of her day. Amy Adams’s soft, dulcet tone further enhances the humour of her female rage. It’s not just something mothers will connect with; all women will see themselves in the juxtaposition between her soft exterior and her bitter mind.

Nightbitch isn’t just a meditation on what women have to give up becoming mothers, while the fathers continue their own lives; it’s much more eccentric than that. Mother starts to notice her body changing. The first sign of these changes is a long hair spouting from her chin. She plucks it and puts it down to wacky postpartum hormones, as most women have in their lives.

As the days pass, Mother’s body begins to change further. She soon notices that her new urges and body modifications parallel the wild dogs who roam her neighbourhood. It hints at body horror but is ultimately an exaggeration of how a woman’s body changes after having a baby and how they lose themselves to maternal urges. For a movie about a woman whose maternal urges transform her into a canine, Nightbitch is all a bit tame and middle of the road.

Nightbitch is empowering but could have pushed the boundaries even further. For a film that wants to explore womanhood and motherhood through body horror, it’s too polite. The film downplays much of the transformative scenes that Yoder’s source novel wasn’t afraid to describe. Only a few moments linger on the horror of her transformation, a not-so-subtle allegory to the ways motherhood takes its toll on the body. The movie, instead, focuses on the metaphorical transformation of Adams’s character.

Nightbitch also occasionally falls into dated gender stereotypes. The clueless yet good-meaning husband, the overworked wife who gives up everything for motherhood, and the other ditsy mums she is forced to be friends with are all well-worn and dated clichés.

Director Marielle Heller (A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood) wants to start a conversation, using clear-cut stereotypes to prompt discussion about the fact that women can’t have it all when men are expected to not give up any aspects of their life when their children come along. Mother’s regrets about being a mother are never shamed; her concerns at missing who she was and feeling insignificant in life are sensitively handled through an articulate narration. These monologues do fall into being too on the nose, telling audiences much more than they show.

Amy Adams is clearly having a blast in the role, fully committing to the duality of woman. She is soft and playful with her son, yet every nursery rhyme told through gritted teeth, every smile to a fellow mother never reaches the eyes. The actress isn’t afraid to get messy and ugly as she pulls out chin hair, pops zits, and becomes an animalistic version of herself. It feels like Adams had more to unleash in this role, with the script holding back an outstandingly wild performance.

Nightbitch is at its best when lifting the curtain back on being a mother. It documents vulnerable emotions most new mothers don’t feel comfortable expressing and explains why more and more women don’t want to give up their independence in exchange for bringing a child into the world.

When it comes to the horror aspect of the story, Heller keeps it on a tight leash. Any of the more fantastical elements are downplayed. Considering how out there the plot is, Nightbitch holds back too much and doesn’t embrace its weirdness. It chooses to focus on ambiguity rather than completely letting go.

Nightbitch has the potential to do for motherhood what The Substance did for beauty standards for women. Instead, the body horror is lacklustre, the concept is shyly explored, and scenes that should be visceral and upsetting lack the required spark.

USA | 2024 | 98 MINUTES | 2.39:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Marielle Heller.
writer: Marielle Heller (based on the novel by Rachel Yoder).
starring: Amy Adams, Scoot McNairy, Arleigh Snowden, Emmett Snowden, Zoë Chao, Mary Holland, Ella Thomas, Archana Rajan & Jessica Harper.