I think Nightbitch is an attempt at a horror-comedy. It edges near body horror at some moments, but cuts away fast enough to avoid being jarring or effective. It focuses most evidently on magical realism, but fails to demonstrate anything interesting visually. It pokes into rich themes of motherhood and womanhood, but retreats before really engaging with them. It has the conventions of a family comedy, with hamfisted moments of sarcastic dialogue and gross suburban iconography, but none of these half-baked elements of the film blend well with one another at all. There’s no efficacy in the contrast, shifting this attempt at horror-comedy into perhaps a really strange made-for-TV family dramedy, or perhaps a structure-less episode of Goosebumps. It’s difficult to exactly tell what Nightbitch was intended to be. It gestures towards a few different ideas and themes, but never really gets close to indulging in any of them; in seeking simplicity and narrative coherence, the film instead comes off as tonally inconsistent and empty, an absolute missed opportunity. 

Even when delving into the weird aspects of the novel, the film seems to get scared or too sheepish, and not go any further. It’s a betrayal to the attempted themes and commentary in the book when the film envelops itself in tidy conclusions and explanations to make what should be a film about animalistic mess into something stagnant and clean. It shies away from being shocking or interesting, and retreats back into the standard conventions of thin, social commentary rather than go further into what could have made for an effective, feminist picture. Nightbitch is a weird novel, it is fantastical and fascinating, and provides an expanse of themes and commentary that should make for a profound blend of body horror, magical realism, and critiques of stale suburbia. The film, disappointingly, plays it safe. 

Nightbitch begins fairly abruptly, at a scene in the grocery store where our main character, whom we only know as Mother (played by the incredible Amy Adams), runs into a colleague, and begins to give an impassioned rant about the frustrations of motherhood after being asked how she must just love being a mom. The camera zooms in claustrophobically, exacerbating Mother’s rage. Then it cuts back to reality, and Mother complies, “Yeah, I just love being a mom.” Director Marielle Heller will repeat this technique throughout the film, as Mother imagines giving a rageful, occasionally violent reaction, but in reality, opts for docility and politeness. It’s occasionally effective, at least comedically, but eventually begins to feel tired and repetitive. The film avoids indulging fully in the body horror of her transformation into a dog, offering only brief occasional glimpses, or all the violence that accompanies it, which carries so much weight in the themes of the novel. Nightbitch consistently shies away from showing anything genuinely unsettling, instead retreating like a dog with its tail between its legs. 

A very disappointing aspect of Nightbitch is that despite its attempt at criticizing the confinement and frustration that can accompany motherhood, the lead Mother is given little personality or background outside of her new identity and how it challenges her. We know she’s a former artist, and that she’s been relegated to a stay-at-home mom due to a complete imbalance of responsibilities between her and Husband (Scoot McNairy). She takes constant care of Son (Arleigh and Emmett Snowden) while he’s off on business trips, or neglectfully attempting to help raise him at home. The exposition and background is flimsy at best, and most of the tension is derived from Husband giving commonly frustrating colloquialisms that illustrate his ignorance towards parenting, and/or a lack of respect towards Mother. Mother is characterized primarily through voiceover, which comes off lazy and uninspired – here it seems Heller opts to tell and not show, to explain plainly what the film might hope it comes across as, to attempt to flesh out the character of Mother, yet it proves unsuccessful and forgettable. If she isn’t telling us her exact thoughts with a voiceover, she’s doing it when talking to herself, somehow even more plain. Adams still does an excellent job, playing the comedic moments perfectly and undeniably engaging in the weirder moments, but the character doesn’t get enough depth for the film to really shine. She gives it her all, but it isn’t enough to salvage the film. 

At all moments, the script feels flimsy. Scenes that mix magical realism and blockbuster-like comedy rotate back and forth, interspersed with dream and imagination sequences where Mother meditates on her relationship with her own mother as well as her career as an artist that she feels slipping from her. Maybe on paper, it sounds effective. But the lack of tonal coherence makes the film feel disjointed, and nearly unfinished. Due to the sloppy editing, it at times feels more like a collection of impassioned commercials and ironic music videos than a coherent film. There is simply no thesis to be dissected, no important takeaways or commentary fleshed out or even fully thought through. This blandness paired with the empty characterization makes for an extremely unsatisfying film – it feels as though there are no stakes and no reality or person to be grounded in. The one thing the film relies on is its attempt at being relatable, but that doesn’t make it interesting. 

If Nightbitch is supposed to be empowering and relatable and nothing more, then it still does a fine job at pulling laughs and exasperated sighs from the audience, and Adams in particular plays the role with keen relatability, anger, and humor. The entirety of the film plays as a PSA towards all non-mothers about the difficulties of motherhood – and I mean no disrespect to this idea of course, but for the zaniness of the premise, it’s a pure disappointment that this is all there is to it. The potential the source material had for a film adaptation was wild and rich, to expand deeper into motherhood, womanhood, and female comradery, but Nightbitch fumbled the opportunity immensely. With safe, stale imagery and clumsy near-attempts at truly illustrating the body horror and magical realism that denote the premise, Nightbitch has made such a fascinating premise as uninteresting and bland as possible. Heller is still a talented director with a skew towards weirdness, but Nightbitch seems to have no coherent identity at all, the undeniable talents of Amy Adams wasted once again. One year Amy Adams will return and finally win her Oscar, but this is not that year. 

Nightbitch
2024
dir. Marielle Heller
108 min.

Now playing @ Coolidge Corner Theatre, Kendall Square Cinema, and AMC Boston Common