Nightbitch

by Mike McGranaghan

Amy Adams has been lighting up the screen for twenty years with a consistently high-quality string of performances. She made a fairy tale princess come alive in Enchanted, interacted credibly with the Muppets, and matched Meryl Streep in two pictures, Julie & Julia and Doubt. Her role in Nightbitch calls upon her essential realness to sell its outlandish premise, in which a stay-at-home mom begins exhibiting canine traits.

That seems like the premise for a dumb comedy. The pedigree here is much higher than that, though. The best-selling novel by Rachel Yoder has been adapted by Can You Ever Forgive Me? director Marielle Heller, so there’s a strong commitment to capturing a feminine perspective. Mother (Adams) has hit the pause button on her career to care for her young son while Husband (Scoot McNairy) works. She loves the kid, but spending day after day cleaning up fingerpaint messes and making trips to story time at the library has begun to leave her unfulfilled. This ennui has the effect of causing her to grow hair in new places, along with the beginnings of a tail. Running free as a dog gives her the liberty she otherwise feels has been lost.

With that concept in place, Nightbitch has to decide how weird it wants to go. Despite some undeniably weird moments, the film is fairly restrained in its woman-into-dog depiction. This is for the better. Had it relied on showing Adams made up with total canine prosthetics, Mother’s personal journey would have been overshadowed. By reigning in the concept’s inherent outrageousness a bit, we’re forced to focus on what this woman is going through, i.e. the sensation of being confined by an electric fence that keeps her in the yard, watching everybody else have all the fun.

Adams does a fantastic job suggesting Mother’s ambivalence toward parenting. She makes you understand that being a mom has fulfilled a part of this woman, while also conveying the realization that being a parent can’t fulfill every part of her. There’s comic weariness in the performance as the character grows frustrated with the never-ending duty of caring for a child while simultaneously feeling guilty about that frustration. When Nightbitch has Mother examining herself with a mirror and finding the base of a tail growing, the discovery doesn’t send her into an existential dilemma because she’s already in one. Adams keeps our focus not on the tail but on how it represents the awareness that her existence has been altered.

I suspect a lot of women will heavily relate to the film. Men shouldn’t be frightened off from it. As a male, I found that it gave me a considerable amount to ponder. Our society values motherhood – as it should – yet sends the message that mothers ought to consider themselves complete by the process. People are more dimensional than that. As wonderful as having children is, no one can be made whole by a single element. And if we, as men, don’t appreciate all that the women we love hope to accomplish, we have failed as partners.

I should note that Nightbitch is very funny at times, using Mother’s transformation to come at a serious subject from a satiric angle. That, added to Amy Adams’ fantastic work, is what makes it as entertaining as it is substantive. The Yoder/Heller/Adams trio has unleashed a feminist tale with, no pun intended, real bite.

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