In the tumultuous realm of motherhood, where chaos reigns and vulnerabilities lay bare, Amy Adams plunges into this wild, untamed journey in Marielle Heller’s cinematic adaptation of Nightbitch. Here, Adams embodies a harried mother grappling with the intricacies of parenting—a veritable whirlwind that renders all prior notions of civility obsolete. “Perhaps the most violent experience a human can endure,” she contemplates, on the fringes of sanity, as the narrative oscillates between the mundane and the bizarre.
Adapted from Rachel Yoder’s enthralling 2021 novel, Nightbitch experiments with a concoction of psychological insight and the visceral urgency of genre cinema, hoping to navigate the treacherous waters between cerebral musings and shock-laden spectacles. It draws fleeting comparisons to harrowing films like Tully and The Babadook, both of which delve into the complex labyrinths of maternal experience, often blurring the lines between reality and the surreal. Yet, amidst its ambitious narrative aspirations, it falters.
The film’s depiction of Adams’s transformation into a canine—a potent allegory for her submerged primal instincts—eludes a coherent exploration. Instead, it endlessly reiterates its themes as if caught in a loop, echoing the frustrations of a sleep-deprived parent grappling with an overwhelming to-do list. While there are moments of sheer brilliance—Adams’s face, a canvas for unspoken marital tensions and the heavy weight of unexpressed grievances—the overall experience teeters dangerously close to the cliché.
Heller, renowned for her deft handling of the domestic sphere in Can You Ever Forgive Me?, finds herself in turbulent waters when the narrative dives into the absurd. The film would undoubtedly flourish more spectacularly if it leaned wholeheartedly toward either intimate drama or outrageous surrealism. Instead, it lingers in an unfulfilling limbo, a missed opportunity echoing with the bittersweet nostalgia of what could have been. Motherhood, as portrayed here, is a feral creature—untamed, relentless, but ultimately, only half-realized.
