Nightbitch (15)

A nameless stay-at-home Mother tends to her young son in the suburbs while Father casually goes out to work. 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 unvarnished truth about her situation. 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 neighbourhood.

LondonNet Film Review

Nightbitch (15) Film Review from LondonNet

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.

– Jo Planter