‘Nightbitch’ Review: Marielle Heller’s Horror Comedy Heels When It Should Bark

At one point in writer-director Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch, Amy Adams’s “Mother” says via voiceover: “Motherhood isn’t all sunshine and baby powder. Motherhood is fucking brutal.” That sentiment may be more widely acknowledged today, yet it’s still largely minimized, even by women experiencing that anguish firsthand.

Frustrated by the conflicts of motherhood, much of Mother’s wrath throughout the film, an adaptation of the novel by Rachel Yoder, comes out in voiceover or in quirky imagined asides where she tells others how she really feels before snapping back into reality and putting on a brave, smiling face. Something, though, has to give, and it does when Mother starts to suspect, per the film’s title, that she turns into a dog whenever the sun goes down. It’s a provocative metaphor for the way that it literalizes the transformative experience of motherhood. But as Nightbitch wades through its heightened narrative conceit, it increasingly pulls its punches.

Beginning in the midst of Mother’s harried yet exactingly ordered day-to-day routine, Nightbitch throws us into an expectedly tedious cycle of domestic chores and child care. Gradually, we begin to learn more about who this woman is, or, rather, was before the seemingly dog-eat-dog sport of motherhood consumed her life. Once a city-dwelling artist and gallery worker, Mother eventually moved to the suburbs with her “Husband” (Scoot McNairy) when their son was born. As is the norm in these kinds of traditional family units, though, Husband’s work situation hasn’t changed at all, and with him being almost constantly away on business trips, it leaves Mother feeling as if she’s effectively a single parent.

“I feel like a ’50s housewife,” Mother tells Husband at one point, and Nightbitch does a good job, in ways both precisely cutting and broadly farcical, in showing how outdated gender norms of the past can be traced to the present. Husband, for instance, is portrayed as a loving partner but also aloof and ignorant. Even though he’s willing to help out when he does come home from one of his business trips, he constantly needs to call out for Mother’s assistance, as he appears perfectly content to simply watch their child in the bath while scrolling through his phone. Barely repressing her seething anger in this moment, Mother tells him, “You know, when you’re not here, I do this all by myself”—words that are met with a blank stare.

The inner turmoil that wracks Mother comes into even sharper focus as Nightbitch homes in on the disappointment she feels over having given up on her career aspirations. When Mother starts to consider seriously giving up any future hopes of getting back to her art practice, Husband blithely agrees, which only enrages her further for his lack of encouragement. “I thought I was just supporting you,” the man argues, exposing how little he actually understands or cares about the thoughts and feelings of the woman with whom he’s built a life.

Meanwhile, Mother doesn’t connect with any of the other insufferably chipper moms in the vicinity, and her former friends in the art world could care less about her new life, subtly mocking her when she meets up with them for dinner. It’s no wonder Mother eventually has to blow off some steam by running around at night on all fours and mangling the neighborhood critters, a scenario that Heller stages with magical-realist brio, suggesting that it may just all be a dream springing from the protagonist’s revulsion for her post childbirth body.

But despite its perceptiveness about motherhood, most notably its depiction of the microaggressions faced by mothers, it’s disappointing to see a film with such a weird premise as Nightbitch ease into an orthodox storytelling mode. While her increasing canine transformations allow Mother to come to the realization that she needs to re-establish her sense of individuality, the ease with which she’s able to reclaim her former life feels less like a realistic triumph than the starry-eyed outcome of a derivative Hollywood movie.

Husband reaches toward enlightenment in Nightbitch’s final stretch as well, and it feels similarly facile. You may get whiplash from his 180-degree turn from being disinterested in Mother’s travails to being sobbingly apologetic and compassionate after simply being tasked with taking care of their son alone for a couple of days and realizing that, yes, child care is hard.

While it’s nice that Mother and Husband resolve to evenly split the load of domestic life by the film’s end, Nightbitch doesn’t go any farther to really interrogate the heteronormative lifestyle that they comfortably settle back into—one that has its roots so deeply entrenched in patriarchy that it keeps women trapped no matter how much control they aim to exert over it. Which is to say that, in spite of its righteous indignation, Nightbitch heels instead of getting too messy.