In the novels of Rachel Yoder night bitchan unknown woman plays a housewife who leads an unfulfilling life and becomes so busy that she collapses. She was angry, thirsty, and hungry, all feelings she understood. But she also suspected she might turn into a dog, a thought that both frightened and excited her.
All of these beats and Yoder’s copious prose appear in a new adaptation of writer/director Marielle Heller’s 2021 novel. But where the book was a very strange character study of a woman questioning what it means to be a mother in a patriarchal society that demands perfection, the movie feels more like a cheesy comedy that’s really revealing. Teeth feel uneasy. When Heller takes action night bitch There are moments where it seems poised to delve into the nitty-gritty of the book’s ideas about motherhood, but it never quite summons the courage to go crazy.
Once upon a time, before leaving the city to start a family, Mother (Amy Adams) was a respected artist with a keen eye for the eccentric. Her ability to see profound beauty in horrific things like rotting animal carcasses is part of what draws her husband (Scott McNairy) to her, and his respect for her creativity makes their pairing feel Like a perfect match. After a few years of marriage, the mother and her husband welcomed their son (twins Arlie and Emmett Snowden), and there is still a lot of love between them. But because her mother quit her art gallery job and her husband traveled frequently, she was often left alone with her children day and night, to the point where she almost felt like a single parent.
The mother’s love for her son is deeper than words can express, but she struggles to find meaning in a playdate-obsessed mom culture. She hated spending afternoons in the library with her son, surrounded by screaming, drooling children. The husband’s insistence that he would rather “hang out” with his son all day instead of clocking in at work makes it clear to the mother that he has no idea how much physical and mental work it takes to raise a child. My mother felt that she had withered into a shadow of her former self, a feeling so intense that she often felt like a failure. But her silent rage at the trappings of her life gives rise to something unexpected—a character called the Night Mother, who has a penchant for barking and snarling out all the ugly, honest thoughts that mothers usually keep hidden.
As the mother speaks matter-of-factly about her adventures among animal humans, you can hear Heller (who also wrote the script) grappling with the challenge of making the novel’s radically introspective story more readable on screen. Adams’ mother remains a complicated woman who doesn’t know how to explain her newfound urge to howl or the hair growing on her body from unexpected places. But Heller’s night bitch The emotional arc of the mother’s transformation is presented in a more direct manner, removing some of the cerebral tension from the story.
The film comes to life in some of its scarier moments, showing rather than telling you how the Night Mother’s presence inside her mother makes her feel like she’s turned into an animal. The much-discussed dog transformation sequence adds to the film’s pseudo-supernatural element, which is meant to make you wonder how much of this is just happening in the mother’s mind. But every time a mother breaks the fourth wall, laments her husband’s incompetence, or fantasizes about the mildly harsh things she might say if she cared less about other people’s feelings, this delightfully unsettling energy disappear.
Although Adams’ performance is strong, the blandness of the mother and her night-bitch roles prevent her from feeling like the complex, challenging character she could be. That’s very little Nightbitch says. mean or offensive, and the film never really lets her pop out in a way that makes her feel like a deviant being who violates social norms. If the mother had been an unsympathetic character, the film might have been more effective in illustrating the popular idea of how society encourages women to repress parts of themselves and put the needs of others before their own. Instead, the film casts the mother as an eccentric woman at the center of a comedy in which the stakes are never particularly high.
although night bitch Aspiring to the subversive provocation its title evokes, its insistence on being a feel-good film misses the mark. It might make you laugh, but it’s nothing worth howling at the moon.
night bitch Also starring: Zoe Chao, Mary Holland, Ella Thomas, Akanara Rajan, Jessica Harper and Roslyn Gentle. The film will be released on December 6.
