FILM/ REVIEW
NIGHTBITCH
Rated R
99 Minutes
Released December 6th
Nightbitch is reminiscent in style of a 1960’s-1970’s avant-garde film. It candidly explores the dark side of motherhood, which is rarely laid open for discussion. Just as soldiers don’t like to talk about war experiences, women don’t tend to talk about the agony of giving birth and the loneliness of living 24/7 in the world of a baby or toddler. These memories become compartmentalized in the “downstairs file cabinet” of the brain, rarely if ever retrieved. Otherwise, women might not go through with birth multiple times.
This movie is a no-holds-barred foray into this dark side, laying bare the bad and the ugly without censorship. The story seems a little haphazard, taking the audience on a roller coaster from one emotion to another, without a fluid driver to the narrative. Amy Adams is unabashedly herself as a painfully frustrated mother. The situations that arise run from banal to bizarre, and you don’t know from one minute to another what’s coming next. If you ever get a chance to see the 1965 film Repulsion by Roman Polanski starring Catherine Deneuve, you will find it eerily echoes Nightbitch. Deneuve’s character suffers psychotic breaks and the lines between normalcy and episodes of madness are shadowy but clearly rendered. Some of the time in Nightbitch, you may not be sure what is real or not. Adams’ character is so annoyed with motherhood, which has taken away her freedom and creativity, that she finds herself changing physically and relating closely to the dogs in the neighborhood, especially at night.
Nightbitch is based on a book by Rachel Yoder who grew up in a Mennonite community in Eastern Ohio on the edge of the Appalachians. She studied writing in college and received her MBA. Nightbitch is her first book, published in 2021 and awarded “Best Book of the Year” by Esquire and Vulture. Director Marielle Heller connected with Rachelle Yoder’s yet-unpublished novel in 2020, and she and Amy Adams began to work on the film during the Pandemic. Heller says that one thing she liked about the book was “how much ambiguity there was about what I was reading, what was real and what wasn’t. Adams was immediately drawn to the book when she read it. “It had this internal monologue that felt like it had reached into the recesses of your mind and said things you weren’t allowed to say out loud,” she notes.
Adams herself was raised in a Mormon family with 7 children in Colorado. After high school, she worked jobs at The Gap and Hooters. She trained as a dancer and singer but never as an actor – that just happened after she was discovered by Kirstie Alley while performing in a dinner theatre in Minnesota. Adams has never stopped working to advance her career, even after she herself gave birth. She has worked steadily in film and TV, and she’s been nominated for 14 Oscars for her performances. Of her role in Nightbitch, she reports, “There was a lot I was going through, and I just decided to meet Mother (the role) where I was at instead of trying to put a veneer over it…and to let go of this myth of perfection.”
Scoot McNary is excellent as Mother’s “Husband,” as are twins Arleigh and Emmett Snowden as the toddler son. The other stars are some very talented dogs, including Juno who plays Mother’s alter ego. Heller had decided that Mother had to be played by a husky, and that breed is hard to train. However they found Juno through a trainer, and she came through with a great performance.
In many ways, this is a courageous movie. It’s not an earthshaking work of art, but it exposes in true reality the myth that motherhood is all roses and sunshine. This expose on motherhood addresses the dictates of how a mother is supposed to behave in our society and the frustration that many women harbor with that expectation. It’s as if Adams portrays the thought bubble in a sarcastic comic strip about the “joys of motherhood.” Per Adams, “When you have a kid, you’re dealing with poop and throw-up…your relationship with anything being ‘gross’ has changed.”
Kathryn Whitney Boole has spent most of her life in the entertainment industry, which has been the backdrop for remarkable adventures with extraordinary people. She is a Talent Manager with Studio Talent Group in Santa Monica. kboole@gmail.com
