Film Review of the Week

Comedy

Nightbitch (15)

Review: In her 2017 novel Little Fires Everywhere, author Celeste Ng offers this sobering assessment of the minefield of parenting: “Motherhood seems to be a no-win battle: however you decide to do (or not do) it, someone’s going to be criticising you.” Little fires become raging infernos in Nightbitch, a darkly comedic portrait of contemporary motherhood adapted by writer-director Marielle Heller from Rachel Yoder’s 2021 magical realist novel of the same title. Anchored by a fearless central performance by Amy Adams as a visual artist, who has let her creative juices run dry to become a stay-at-home parent, this wildly ambitious and uneven feminist fable cocks its leg in body horror territory without going far enough to unsettle or disgust like The Substance, starring Demi Moore.

Heller’s script detonates carefully contained explosions of humour using the central character’s droll inner monologue, revealing the anguish behind her smile. “What fresh hell awaits you today?” she despairs, hoping forlornly that the rising sun might herald respite – however brief – from the physical and psychological exhaustion. The heroine’s isolation and loneliness are piercingly palpable, especially when she’s in the company of others, and Adams powerfully conveys the churning emotions that might drive a mother at the end of her tether to wish for a different life or unleash a torrent of primal, snarling violence.

The nameless stay-at-home Mother (Adams) tends to her young son in the suburbs while Father (Scoot McNairy) casually goes out to work to pay the bills. The exhausted parent spends most days alone with her rambunctious child, making occasional visits to the supermarket where she daydreams about telling an acquaintance the cold, unvarnished truth about her situation: “I feel like I’m stuck inside a prison of my own creation.”

The loss of her former self becomes evident when Mother meets up with other frazzled parents at daycare including Jen (Zoe Chao), Liz (Archana Rajan) and Miriam (Mary Holland). Trapped in a whirlpool of rage and frustration about the loss of her identity, Mother becomes convinced that she is turning into one of the dogs that roam the local neighbourhood. Her mood swings and change of personality do not go unnoticed. “What happened to my wife?” laments Father. “She died in childbirth,” icily retorts his spouse.

Nightbitch is dominated by Adams’ mesmerising depiction of a creative mind unravelling in real-time, whose only artistic outlet is fingerpainting with her four-year-old. Cinematographer Brandon Trost conjures different moods inside the family home, where swathes of the self-reflection take place, and he clearly relishes the fantastical night-time scenes where the leading lady is hunched on all fours, clawing at her front lawn. Heller keeps the picture on a tight leash, even with those exuberant surrealist flourishes that howl at the moon and hope someone in the audience howls back in sympathy.

Comedy

Rumours (12A)

Review: Politicians are sometimes accused of speaking a lot but saying very little. The easy disposability of modern political discourse is one of the prime targets of a hallucinogenic satire directed by experimental Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin and brothers Evan and Galen Johnson. Set in the German countryside during a Night Of The Living Dead-esque reanimation of mummified human cadavers dating back almost 2,000 years, Rumours convenes members of the G7, the seven-strong political forum of some of the world’s most advanced economies, to allay fears about an unspecified global crisis.

When leaders come under attack from marauding bog people, who furiously self-pleasure to the point of physical combustion, politicians initially assume these shadowy figures are activists with a muddy agenda: “Protesters, if a little unconventional.” As the film loosens its fingertip grasp on reality, Evan Johnson’s script mines sporadic humour from one character collapsing with exhaustion and whispering, “I’m having an energy crisis!” and a surreal sequence anchored to an artificial intelligence chatbot that entraps paedophiles. The theme of the G7 summit is regret and the filmmaking trio of Maddin, Johnson and Johnson might regret not drawing more blood from sustained attacks on an impotent political elite, who excel at crafting hollow, ambiguous soundbites and gossiping about each other’s personal lives.

Leaders of the G7 gather in Dankerode, hosted by the perfectly pant-suited Chancellor of Germany, Hilda Ortmann (Cate Blanchett). They have been tasked with drafting a unified statement to clearly address the current situation. “But not so clear that we put ourselves in an awkward position,” adds Hilda.

Following a media photo opportunity with the mummified body of a recently excavated bog person from the Iron Age, Hilda hosts an al fresco dinner in a specially constructed gazebo with Maxime Laplace (Roy Dupuis), Prime Minister of Canada, Cardosa Dewindt (Nikki Amuka-Bird), Prime Minister of the UK, Sylvain Broulez (Denis Menochet), President of France, Antonio Lamorte (Rolando Ravello), Prime Minister of Italy, Tatsuro Iwasaki (Takehiro Hira), Prime Minister of Japan, and the President of the United States, Edison Wolcott (Charles Dance). Guttural screams reverberate through the evening air and discombobulated leaders discover they are under attack from magically revived bog people.

Rumours is an oddity that might have tumbled from the imagination of David Lynch, with outlandish narrative detours including Alicia Vikander’s bewildering entrance at the midway point. Blanchett is preened to perfection as a natural born leader whose lustful longings could prove her undoing while Dance pointedly evokes a current US statesman and speaks with an English accent for reasons that the script deliberately sidesteps. An oppressive score composed by Kristian Eidnes Andersen teases menace in some dimly lit scenes and overwhelms others. Ultimately, I was just as dazed and confused as the characters.