2024 | rated R | starring Amy Adams, Scoot McNairy, Jessica Harper | directed by Marielle Heller | 1h 39m | 1 1/2 out of 5 stars |
It’s too bad a movie with such an aggressive title and potentially wild concept came out so half-baked. I suppose Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch can be looked at like Barbie – a time capsule for a section of the population screaming out for help in a way that exposes more about the philosophical echo chamber they’ve trapped themselves in than it does about the subject they’re supposedly satirizing. Where Barbie supposedly took on the patriarchy attempting to dance around logic holes and sew together a fictional world to make its case, Nightbitch builds itself a very specific situation that its main character finds herself in and uses it go to war with pregnancy itself. It’s the latest in a line of movies to do this, so while it articulates its case with some clarity it also isn’t the first to do so by a long shot.
Because Nightbitch is super-pretentious, Amy Adams plays an unnamed Mother in a family where nobody has a name. They’re all just archetypes that speak for all mothers, fathers and children. It’s the first shot across the bow that this movie isn’t attempting to tell a story about characters with motivations. She has a young son (Arleigh and Emmett Snowden) and paused her art career to raise him while her husband (Scoot McNairy) travels for work most of the time. The mounting rage of what her life has become and the unrealized potential she threw away is causing her to revert to a feral state. Soon she’s pulling hair out of her lower back and packs of dogs are showing up at the door in the middle of the night wanting to fight her. By day, she’s an angry mother who hates the moms in her son’s book group, by night she runs the neighborhood eating squirrels in an explosive feminist expression of freedom. I guess.
We can take this in two parts, first the literal story and then what it’s trying to say. Literally, Nightbitch goes down with Tuesday, Lamb and more prolific on the horror side with the likes of The Babbadock of movies that are essentially dramas that drop a fantastical element into it to a) illustrate it’s point visually, metaphorically and often pretentiously and b) tease the audience with something really weird who might shy away from a straight drama. Adams’ mother isn’t a skinwalker or shapeshifter, she’s a metaphor and as a metaphor she can do whatever she wants. Heller has zero interest in the actual body horror that might come with a woman-turns-int0-a-dog movie. She’s simply creating an answer to the often-claimed idea that men have a primitive animal instinct, turning that on its head and against the claim that women are naturally more maternal. Heller is saying women are the primitive animals who have unfairly shouldered the unnatural responsibility of giving birth and raising kids because society put it on them. And what comes of mother’s transformation into a dog? New challenges, a secret double life, a rivalry with another dog or a new perspective on her own life? Nah, none of that stuff. We just see a dog run around at night.
On the metaphor level – you might even call it world building in a domestic sense – a lot has to be left out of the script to sever this movie from how Mother got in this situation so the audience will sympathize with her. 1) Husband is a complete stooge who is never around. McNairy is in a useful idiot role here, a father who travels all the time and is completely oblivious to the needs of his wife to the point that it’s unclear what she ever saw in him and why they got married in the first place. 2) Mother has no parents, no family herself and no support system. 3) Mother has no friends outside of other mothers. Did she ever or did she cast those friends out because they weren’t moms like her?
4) The job that mothers always give up in these movies is always something prestigious or a leisure activity that they monetized. Mother was into “art”. When they don’t paint all day or own their own business, they are powerful board members and CEOs. None of the women in these movies ever work in a cubicle as a corporate drone dealing with bad bosses and toxic co-workers. 5) The kids are always shown to be nothing but mess machines that poop and pee and put paint on the walls. This despite the fact that Son in this movie is one of the cutest and most natural kids I’ve seen in a movie recently. There is never a moment where Mother finds joy in experiencing the world for the first time through his eyes or any notion that he will grow up. Nope, kids just poop, always and forever. 6) Mother has never heard of a babysitter or for unknown reasons can’t hire one.
The movie’s ultimate problem and solution, lies in the marriage that it has created between mother and father. Yet, instead of exploring that it uses it as a vehicle to assault pregnancy. And I mean assault it. Nightbitch rails against pregnancy: the first act a child does is to commit violence against the mother (for those not deranged, that’s New York feminist aspiring-writer for “give birth”). It depicts women as having this innate volcanic force of light that they have to do something monumentally explosive with or they have wasted their lives. The pressure is on, ladies. In this movie that monumentally explosive potential that Mother has is painting. Still Lifes, of people lounging and eating fruit.
We’re seeing a tug-of-war of sorts in Hollywood over how to handle pregnancy. In the same year Illana Glazeer gave us the pro-pregnancy Babes and Human Magic about how her experience changed her life for the better and Jenny Slate detailed her eye-opening look and birth with her excellent one-woman show Seasoned Professional.
Nightbitch is an aggressive movie that might have gotten away with it too if it wasn’t for the sheer buzzy dominance of The Substance. A movie that rages against the unfair treatment of women but does so in a way that matches that message with invention, imagination and skillful filmmaking. It’s still a movie with characters and not just a metaphor. The Substance has dominated most of the movie-going conversation in the 4th quarter of 2024. This movie could learn a thing or 10 from it.