Nightbitch: Marielle Heller depicts the challenges of motherhood with a satirical bite

“What fresh hell awaits you today?” sighs a weary toddler mum in front of the bathroom mirror. With a grunt of habitual defeat, Mother (Amy Adams) drapes a stained, oversized shirt over the hairy bump on her lower back, noting its existence but ignoring that it weirdly resembles a tail. The protagonist of Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch is overtired and under-appreciated and, as in Rachel Yonder’s best-selling novel of 2021, on which the film is based, sometimes turns into a dog. It’s a snarling, on-the-wet-nose metaphor for parental transformation, but one that this surprisingly tender film puts to good use. 

Mother and her two-year-old Son (played by twins Arleigh and Emmett Snowden) are glued together from morning to night, with play, piggybacks and meals at the tiny kid’s table peppered throughout the day. While Husband (Scoot McNairy) is away for work, Mother’s time stretches infinitely in a repetition of bed, table, game, walk, table, bed – quick cuts reveal more about the accumulating weight of childcare than the confessional voiceover alone. Stuck between routines she enjoys and isolation she detests, Mother is understandably reluctant to admit that the choice between career and a child has to be either/or. She must be happy, we think, and she is, with no sleep and a heart full of love.

Nightbitch depicts the challenges of motherhood with a satirical bite, but never as a laughing matter. It finds comic potential in everyday toddler chaos, and adds to it a desire to disrupt the mundanities of family life. On several occasions, we get to see Mother react to a patronising comment or unsolicited advice by snapping, shouting or slapping before the scene cuts to a few seconds earlier and her meek, smiley reply. The split in those scenes gives a cinematic outlet to repressed female rage, while also anticipating Mother’s transformation into Nightbitch.

Many allegorical tales where women turn into animals try to tame femininity. In Swan Lake, Odette is cursed by the evil sorcerer Rothbart to live her days as a swan and assume human form at night – which, needless to say, impedes her shot at marriage and love. At the other end of the spectrum, there are figures like Cat Woman (or Bombalurina, played by Taylor Swift, in Tom Hooper’s Cats, 2019) whose overt sex appeal is calculated to simplify the ambivalence of an ‘animalistic’ woman. Here, Mother’s reversible transformation defies such neutering.

First, there are visual cues for the change – growing patches of hair and teeth that become inexplicably sharper – before Adams’s look is enhanced by nipple prosthetics and, finally, there is a full-blown metamorphosis sequence with the camera inhabiting a canine point of view, using low angles and wide lenses, mimicking an animal’s blurred peripheral vision. Mother can woof in the middle of Whole Foods and run on all fours, but neither she nor her body are ever portrayed as monstrous in the manner of patriarchal (and misogynistic) narratives that saw women as a danger to be neutralised. Still, one struggles to define Nightbitch in terms of genre: is it semi-supernatural? Is it a horror-comedy? In this case, the difficulty has less to do with a film’s tonal inconsistencies than with how big a challenge it is for a viewer to imagine a woman’s literal transformation as metaphorical yet still truthful.

It’s the well-calibrated performance of Adams (who has been attached to the project from the very beginning) that fuses the two sides of the character into an ambivalent yet relatable whole. This is not the Amy Adams of Arrival or Nocturnal Animals (both 2016); here, she trades sleekness and composure 
for a disarming vulnerability, in Birkenstocks and baggy clothes. Mother only fully identifies with the role of creator when she has turned the heteronormative family structure upside down. It becomes clear that Mother can only be herself fully in her Nightbitch guise.

Growls, barks and all, Nightbitch is as compassionate as its director: in all her films, Marielle Heller gives us characters who are not just likeable, but lovable. Whether spiky (Melissa McCarthy’s Lee Israel in Can You Ever Forgive Me?, 2018) or soothing (Tom Hanks’s Mr Rogers in A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood, 2019), they all share the same ability to earn a viewer’s affection, instead of simply demanding it by virtue of their star status. Nightbitch would always present a challenge for its lead actress because Adams has to be a movie star while playing not only an overtired stay-at-home mum but a dog as well. But as it turns out, Adams portrays her with a wholehearted empathy and more depth than Yoder’s pen allowed for on paper. Thanks to her, this animal metaphor not only lands, but runs, unleashed.

► Nightbitch arrives in UK cinemas 6 December.