Marielle Heller (2024)
In Nightbitch, adapted by Marielle Heller from Rachel Yoder’s 2021 novel of the same name, a frustrated American wife and mother, played by Amy Adams, starts turning – or thinks she’s turning – into a dog. Adams gives a fine performance and the movie is entertaining but Heller lacks either the film-making imagination or the nerve, perhaps both, to make it sing as a horror-comedy. Adams’s character, Mother, is otherwise nameless; the same goes for Husband (Scoot McNairy) and the couple’s toddler, Son. (This is less irritating in the film than it looks on paper: the woman, man and child don’t, of course, address each other by their cast names.) Until Son was born, Mother, a fine arts graduate, was a moderately successful artist and worked in a local gallery. (The action is set in a town somewhere in the Midwest.) Now she’s confined to the house except when she takes Son to the supermarket or the playground or a library-playgroup sing-along. She feels all the more isolated because Husband is away at work Monday to Friday, returning home just at weekends. The first signs of Mother’s unusual condition arrive when Son comments on her ‘fuzzy’ back. Then she notices unusual facial hair. Sitting in a park with Son, she’s surprised when dogs off the lead gather round, sniffing her enthusiastically. It’s not long before Mother has grown six extra nipples.
In the early scenes, there’s a clear distinction between reality and Mother’s imagining. She bumps into Sally (Adrienne Rose White), who took over her gallery job and asks how she’s enjoying motherhood; in reply, Mother lists with increasing passion the reasons she resents it; Marielle Heller then cuts back to the real world, in which Mother tells Sally she’s utterly happy in her stay-at-home, nurturing role. When Husband says he envies the time she gets to spend with Son, Mother actually does voice frustration. Husband tells her she needs more structure in her life and that ‘happiness is a choice’. She slaps his face. Except that she really doesn’t but reverts to acquiescence. These bits, although obvious, are quite funny. The same goes for Heller’s illustrations of Husband’s domestic incompetence. When, for example, he offers to give Son his bath, Mother gratefully accepts; the next minute, Husband is asking where the towels are kept. Heller seems comfortable for as long as she’s working at this mild level of feminist comedy. Although each of her three previous features – The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015), Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018) and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019) – had a significant element of fantasy or pretence, the magic realist aspect of Nightbitch defeats her.
There are occasional effective bits. Mother takes Son to an eatery; when the crappy cutlery snaps as soon as she tries to use it, she gobbles her food, dog-like, straight from the plate – partly as a joke to entertain Son, mostly because it’s what comes naturally to her now. She takes to nocturnal solo outings (which seems more cat-like than dog-like but never mind). When she returns home covered in mud and takes a shower, Husband exclaims how dirty she is but is turned on by it and joins her in the shower. But the narrative, which makes the same few points repeatedly, needs more in the way of incident and a more ambitious visual style. I can’t honestly say that I would have had a better time if the film were grosser: I’m so squeamish that I flinched even when Son, after doing a poo, hands it to Mother (who’s not so doggy that she’s happy to receive it, by the way). But Nightbitch should be more off the wall. I don’t know how Rachel Yoder’s novel works (and am not going to find out) but I’m guessing it’s narrated by Mother in the first person. The film might be helped if it seemed to be happening entirely inside the protagonist’s head but it doesn’t, even though Mother is in nearly every scene.
Although it’s made clear that Mother isn’t a young mother, Amy Adams sometimes looks a bit too mature, having put on weight to play the role (Mother does a fair amount of comfort eating). Adams is physically fearless in it, though, and not just in the canine department. Mother decides to have a paint day with Son to give her, as well as him, a bit of creative stimulation. It soon gets messy and culminates in Mother’s slipping in the paint and landing flat on her back: if this is trick photography rather than the star actually doing the pratfall, it’s trick photography of a high order. Scoot McNairy partners Adams very well. He expertly conveys Husband’s needy selfishness and comes over as a bit of an animal himself, probably a weasel. Son is played by Arleigh and Emmett Snowden, presumably identical twins and amazingly good, given their very young age.
The real (or CGI) dogs, though, are a disappointment – ditto the film’s climax and finale. Mother and Husband split up; she resumes making art and soon has a successful exhibition; her life as a dog is over. Husband comes along to the exhibition, apologising for how he treated her previously and failed to encourage her as an artist. They reconcile. Nightbitch ends with Mother giving birth again, Husband at her side: we’re supposed to assume she knows what she’s potentially in for, and won’t let it happen a second time. This seems facile: it would be truer to the satirical spirit of the film’s first half if Husband was, out of self-interest, cunningly pretending to have learned his lesson but there’s no suggestion of that. There’s a concluding voiceover from Mother about motherhood being brutal and primal and exhausting. The speech is faintly reminiscent of the America Ferrera character’s number in Barbie until Mother turns suddenly upbeat, extolling Mothers (the upper case seems right in this instance) as gods and creators, too. When we last see the dogs, they’re in the background, keeping a respectful distance now that Mother has got cynanthropy out of her system. In fact these animals have been too well behaved throughout. Nightbitch may sound wild. In Marielle Heller’s hands, it’s domesticated.
17 October 2024
