“A film that aims to be different and provocative, but is not let off the leash enough to become truly transgressive.”
“What happened to my wife?”
“She died in childbirth.”
Motherhood can be a bitch. Mother, the unnamed protagonist of Marielle Heller’s fourth feature film Nightbitch, has found that out the hard way. Once a successful artist whose installations and sculptures graced the halls of prestigious museums, her life has gone to the dogs and become a string of almost indistinguishable days spent with her young son (played by adorable twins Arleigh and Emmett Snowden). Set to the rhythm of Ani DiFranco’s ‘Joyful Girl’, a quick and quirky montage of hashbrown breakfasts and toddler-level conversations establishes Mother’s life as devoid of stimulating variety and intellectual challenge, and full of sleepless nights and mind-numbing sessions at a reading club for toddlers. Her husband (Scoot McNairy) is perpetually away for work, obliviously telling her that he would love to have more time with his family to take care of their son; until he is actually forced to do so, that is.
When her son one morning babbles that mom is ‘fuzzy’, Mother makes a shocking discovery: a tuft of hair on her lower back. It does not take long for whiskers to appear, along with two rows of extra nipples, sharpened teeth, a heightened sense of smell, and a protruding tailbone that, once pierced, reveals the gory beginnings of a tail. Dogs randomly seem attracted to her, leaving ‘gifts’ like a dead rat or fresh poo on her doorstep. What exactly triggers this transformation remains unclear, but Mother is unmistakably turning into a dog. Animal instinct is kicking in.
In Heller’s domesticated adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s more ferocious same-titled novel, this metamorphosis angle, allegorical as it may be, is Nightbitch‘s main draw because it is so out of the ordinary. It is therefore disappointing that Heller never fully commits to Mother’s chimeric storyline, mainly using it to make a convoluted point about the animalism that motherhood evokes in an otherwise tame and fairly predictable Hollywood drama that treats the viewers as if they are part of a young Pixar audience; by the end of the film valuable lessons have been learned, the world is back in balance, and they lived happily ever after. The canine angle is all but forgotten, and in hindsight feels shoe-horned in and also makes the logic of Mother’s world confusing. Clearly some of the more outrageous scenes, such as Mother turning into a beautiful collie roaming the streets at night with her new dog pals, are in the protagonist’s mind, but why would she also imagine herself discovering the early stages of her transformation, thereby deluding herself? Even if it’s metaphorical, the story’s world still has to make sense, and when perfectly innocuous scenes also turn out to be figments of Mother’s imagination the film trips over its own inner logic.
The film around it, and in particular its supporting cast, is a parade of cliches, with characters serving as plot devices to further Mother’s arc rather than being three-dimensional characters of flesh and blood. McNairy’s oblivious husband is thrown an occasional bone to deepen the character, but mostly exists to facilitate his wife’s personal growth. A Greek chorus of fellow stay-at-home moms have no other role than to tame Mother’s above-it-all arrogance a bit and to find a shared self-worth as mothers. Jessica Harper’s librarian Norma, a sage older woman who nudges Mother in the right direction a few times, might not even exist in reality. Nightbitch feels more like the first draft of a thesis on motherhood than an actual story with a natural thrust; the points Heller wants to make, as broad as they are, are clearly there, but never organically work their way into this simple story of a marriage that needs more balance in how the task of taking care of the child it brought into the world is shared.
This would not be much of a problem if the film took more artistic risks, but there too Heller doesn’t know how to maintain tone. A promising start with the aforementioned montage (a technique Heller relies on too much) is followed by a film that only produces memorable imagery when the body horror of its protagonist’s transformation is depicted. Since that aspect is more or less left by the wayside as the story plods on, the back half of the film is devoid of any artistry, resorting to blandly composed shots and shot/reverse shot dialogues. If it wasn’t for the canine angle, Nightbitch would be wholly unremarkable and remarkably safe. Leaving the characters nameless is a tantalizing touch, but when a married couple in a middle-of-the-road comedy-drama does not call each other by name it comes off as incongruent with the tone of the film.
Rising above Nightbitch‘s mediocrity is its star, Amy Adams. As Mother, she dives into this peculiar role with abandon, creating a likable but somewhat snooty woman whose dreams have been dashed by motherhood and the role that a patriarchal upbringing has imprinted on her. Flashbacks to her childhood in a Mennonite community suggest her mother was also afflicted by the same feral condition; but why, if it is all a metaphor, Adams’ character would dream of her mother getting on all fours and running into the woods is not explained. Still, Adams excels in the more dramatic moments, yet also shines when her Disney princess appearance (despite gaining considerable weight for the role) clashes nicely with Mother’s acerbity. If there is any reason to see this film, it is for Adams’ performance, working her way through didactic dialogue (“How many men have delayed their greatness while their women didn’t know what to do with theirs?”) and eating from a dog bowl with equal abandon. Getting through lines like “I can crush a walnut with my vagina” with such conviction is nothing short of a miracle. It is a shame that her talent is wasted on a film that aims to be different and provocative, but is not let off the leash enough to become truly transgressive. Heller angles for something that The Substance, another film about women reaching a stage in life where their dreams and opportunities are taken away, achieves by committing fully. If only Nightbitch would show that commitment.