One of the first of countless wincingly accurate observations on modern motherhood made by Marielle Heller’s new film is the extent to which success can look and feel exactly like failure. In the snappily – or perhaps snappingly – titled dark comedy Nightbitch, Amy Adams stars as a devoted (and nameless) stay-at-home mum, whose (also nameless) toddler, played by twins Arleigh and Emmett Snowden, clearly thinks she’s made of sunshine, and is the greatest human being on earth.
She fries his favourite hash browns every morning, takes him for walks to feed the ducks and watch the bin men do their rounds, and is a regular at their local library’s Book Babies sessions, where she sings along to nursery rhymes. Yet she’s always exhausted and dishevelled, usually hasn’t showered in days, and survives largely on leftover children’s food, gobbled fleetingly off plastic plates.
As for her promising career as an artist, it’s indefinitely on hold – though her husband (Scoot McNairy) is still busily employed in a job that regularly takes him away from their suburban bungalow for nights on end. When he’s home he helps out a bit, but frames it as a rare and special treat: bath time, for instance, becomes ‘daddy bath’, with Adams in skivvying support, fetching clean pyjamas and fresh towels. Every day she feels more animal than human, and sinks deeper into a feral funk – so it feels entirely reasonable, and perhaps even justified, when she starts to turn into a dog.
Yes, dog. In a strong year for bodily transformation films (The Substance, A Different Man), Heller’s adaptation of a 2021 Rachel Yoder novel smartly de-grotesquifies the form, and makes Adams’ metamorphosis feel like the most natural thing in the world. She first suspects the changes are hormonal: perhaps her body’s just putting the paws in perimenopause? But after a while, the elongated fangs, hairy stump protruding from her coccyx and six bonus nipples leave little room for doubt.
Or do they? Heller, the director of Can You Ever Forgive Me? and A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood, is a proven master of the richly textured character study – and despite Nightbitch’s outlandish occult overtones – Jessica Harper, star of the witchy horror classic Suspiria, has a talismanic supporting role as an enigmatic librarian – its writer-director builds enough wriggle room into the script for the changes to be read as either genuine transformation or psychosis.