In Rachel Yoder’s novel Nightbitch, an unnamed woman’s unfulfilling life playing homemaker becomes so all-consuming that she snaps. She’s angry, horny, and hungry, which are all feelings she can understand. But she also suspects that she might be transforming into a dog, an idea that both terrifies and excites her.
All of these beats and plenty of Yoder’s prose are present in writer / director Marielle Heller’s new adaptation of the 2021 novel. But whereas the book was a deeply weird character study of a woman interrogating what it means to be a mother in a patriarchal society that demands unfaltering perfection, the movie is more of a cheesy comedy that feels skittish about really baring its teeth. And while Heller’s take on Nightbitch has a handful of moments that almost seem ready to dig into the meat of the book’s ideas about motherhood, it never quite musters up the courage to go wild.
Once upon a time, before leaving the city to start her family, the Mother (Amy Adams) was a well-respected artist with an eye for the eccentric. Her ability to see profound beauty in gruesome things like decaying animal carcasses is part of what attracted Husband (Scoot McNairy) to her, and his reverence for her creativity made their pairing feel like a perfect match. Love still exists between Mother and Husband a few years into their marriage after they’ve welcomed a baby, Son (twins Arleigh and Emmett Snowden), into the world. But with Mother having quit her art gallerist job and Husband constantly traveling for work, her days and nights are often spent alone with the baby — so much so that she almost feels like a single parent.
Mother adores Son more than she can put into words, but she struggles to find meaning in the playdate-obsessed mommy culture. She hates spending afternoons at the library with Son surrounded by other people’s screaming, slobbering children. And Husband’s insistence that he’d much rather “hang out” with Son all day than clock in at work makes it clear to Mother that he has no idea how much physical and mental labor goes into raising a child. Mother’s sense of having withered into a shadow of her former self is so all-consuming that she often feels like a failure. But her quiet rage about the trappings of her life gives rise to something unexpected — a persona called Nightbitch who revels in barking and snarling out all the ugly, honest thoughts Mother would usually keep to herself.
As Mother matter-of-factly narrates her adventures in zoanthropy, you can hear Heller (who also penned the screenplay) working through the challenge of making the novel’s story of radical introspection more legible for the screen. Adams’ Mother is still a complicated woman who doesn’t know what to make of her newfound urge to howl or the hair sprouting from unexpected places all over her body. But Heller’s Nightbitch presents the emotional arc of Mother’s transformation in a far more straightforward way that drains the story of some of its cerebral tension.
The movie comes alive in a handful of more horrific moments, when it shows rather than tells you how Nightbitch’s presence within Mother makes her feel like she’s becoming an animal. The much-talked-about dog transformation sequence adds to the movie’s pseudo-supernatural element that’s meant to leave you wondering just how much of this is merely happening in Mother’s mind. But that deliciously disconcerting energy evaporates whenever Mother breaks the fourth wall to sigh at Husband’s ineptitude or fantasize about the mildly stern things she might say if she weren’t so concerned with other people’s feelings.
Though Adams delivers a perfectly fine performance, there’s a flatness to Mother and her Nightbitch persona that keeps her from feeling like the complicated, challenging character she could be. Very little of what Nightbitch says is all that mean or off-putting, and the film never really lets her pop off in a way that makes her feel like a transgressive presence bucking social norms. Were Mother more of an unsympathetic character, the movie might be more effective at illustrating its well-trod ideas about how society encourages women to suppress parts of themselves and put the needs of others before their own. Instead, the film frames Mother as a quirky woman at the center of a comedy-drama in which the stakes never feel particularly high.
Though Nightbitch aspires to the subversive provocation its title evokes, its insistence on being a feel-good movie keeps it from hitting the mark. It might make you laugh, but it’s nothing to howl at the moon about.
Nightbitch also stars Zoe Chao, Mary Holland, Ella Thomas, Archana Rajan, Jessica Harper, and Roslyn Gentle. The film hits theaters on December 6th.
