As I watched “Nightbitch,” Marielle Heller’s soothing and satirical paean to motherhood, I kept flashing back to the parking lot where kids had played Capture the Flag at Grace Art Camp, where I worked summers as a counselor for over a decade.
The lot was a vast, gravelly menace. No strip of concrete could contain the boundless energy of the kids; they needed open space where they could run and scream without fear of injury, like the field on a cliff that Holden Caulfield imagines in “The Catcher in the Rye.”
That field—or at least the idea of it—also beckons to parents like Mother (Amy Adams), the beleaguered heroine of “Nightbitch.” Entombed in a cozily domestic hell, Mother wants to sprint, to stretch her legs. All four of them, in fact.
“Nightbitch,” which writer-director Marielle Heller (“A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”) adapted from a 2021 novel by Rachel Yoder, is best described as a movie about a woman who turns into a dog.” Which is completely accurate and completely off the film’s narrative scent.
Yes, Mother sprouts a tail (and a few extra nipples), but this isn’t “The Fly” with hairballs. “Nightbitch” has only a passing interest in body horror; it’s closer to Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody’s “Tully” (2018), which also liberated an exhausted mother through a quasi-fantastical conceit (in that film’s case, hallucinations of the heroine’s younger self).
“Nightbitch” begins with Mother in a grocery store, watching an angry mom (Heller, making a pointed cameo) scold her unruly kids. Will that be me in a few years, Mother silently wonders? Is it me already?
While Mother wearily ferries Son (played by twins Arleigh Patrick Snowden and Emmett James Snowden) to sing-a-longs and baby yoga classes, Husband (Scoot McNairy) enjoys his vaguely defined business trips—and insincerely professes his desire to be a stay-at-home dad.
“Happiness is a choice,” he earnestly tells Mother, who sacrificed her job at an art gallery to raise Son. She responds by slapping Husband’s face—or at least imagines what it would be like to slap his face.
Mother imagines other things, too. Motherhood, she tells us, “is a far more primal thing.” No kidding. When darkness descends, she takes the form of a fearsome, regal red husky, fleeing the confines of home and scouring her suburban neighborhood for prey.
“I’m going to crush its skull!” she announces with relish as she races after a tasty-looking rabbit. Being a vegetarian, I’m loath to admit that the pleasures of the hunt look far more satisfying than the sorry kale salad Mother forces down to impress her graduate school pals.
Is all of this real? Is none of this real? Wisely, Heller blurs the boundary between Mother’s life and mind. Unlike in “Tully,” there’s no suggestion that the main character’s otherworldly visions are born of postpartum psychosis. This time, they’re the mythic embodiment of who she actually is.
“Nightbitch” exists at the intersection of the mortal and the eternal. Schooled by a tome titled “A Field Guide to Magical Women,” Mother informs the other sing-a-long moms, “We create life!” Gods are gods, and yearn to be recognized as divine.
Heller’s filmmaking has embodied the divine feminine since her directorial debut, “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” (2015), which was about 15-year-old cartoonist Minnie (Bel Powley) being sexually abused by her mother’s boyfriend (Alexander Skarsgård).
While “Diary” ended with Minnie and her sister basking in golden sunshine on a beach, blotting out patriarchal tyranny with sisterly light, the film had one example of non-toxic masculinity: Pascal (Christopher Meloni), Minnie’s irritable but steadfast stepfather.
I thought of Pascal whenever “Nightbitch” turned its attention to Husband, who is neither as blameless as he imagines himself to be or as callous as he appears—a dichotomy that comes into focus as Mother castigates him for not preventing her from abandoning her art.
“If you tell me that everything’s fine, I think that everything’s fine!” an exasperated Husband declares. Stereotypical gender roles divide the couple—Mother worries that Husband wants to cast her in the part of 1950’s housewife—but so do mutual failures of expression.
With a title as cheekily provocative as “Nightbitch,” it’s surprising that the film concludes with a call for listening and nurturing, rather than a feral woof. That may be why Heller has wondered if the movie will play to audiences craving a more traditionally transgressive brand of feminism.
“I was, like, people think this is going to be cool,” she told The New Yorker. “This movie’s not cool! It’s dorky, it’s human, it’s vulnerable. It’s not meant to be cool.”
Some critics are confirming Heller’s fears (The Hollywood Reporter deserves a day at the pound for publishing a review with the line “the movie essentially gets spayed”). But cool is a matter of perspective. And if you want women to be heard, don’t lecture them about how loudly they should bark.
