REVIEW: ‘Nightbitch’ (2024) Chews On Consumer Friendly Feminism

There’s promise to Marielle Heller‘s Nightbitch. Early moments of the film showcase a fatigued Amy Adams, here known as ‘Mother,’ enduring the repetitive monotony of the daily life of a stay-at-home mom. The redundancy of flipping Trader Joe’s style hash browns and mixing mac and cheese together becomes its own horrific symphony. But when the most repulsive part of a part body-horror, part female rage-driven drama is the contents of a boxed meal, then you’ve failed to hit the mark.

Mother is a discontented stay-at-home mom who desperately misses when her life had direction and meaning beyond keeping the extension of herself, her son, alive. She speaks endlessly about how she was once an artist yet gave it up to focus on motherhood. Meanwhile, Husband (Scoot McNairy) disappears for days on end for work and whines when Mother forgets to buy milk.

She’s dissatisfied, and as she seeks camaraderie and enlightenment, she notices changes. First, it’s a patch of hair, then sharper canines, and later, an increased sense of smell. Soon, she believes that her maternal instincts are transforming her into a dog.

Based on Rachel Yoder’s book of the same name, the film strives for a particular form of feminist rage through a weak satirical viewpoint. The intent isn’t the problem; it’s the execution. For all of the film’s desire to achieve this call-to-arms moment for women, this uniting front of the endless, complex perils of motherhood, the result is frustratingly limp.

Heller is typically a strong visual storyteller, yet Nightbitch flatlines immediately. It’s at this cross-section of relentlessly silly and capital I important, and by refusing to lean wholly into either, it achieves little.

Nightbitch doesn’t push hard enough

The writing and decision-making all come across as hopeless and derivative. Motherhood is hard. The expectations placed on women to fend off the world while raising a newborn, maintaining a daily balance, and seeking out their dreams and aspirations to not hinder their growth are daunting. Greater still, they’re near impossible. The film makes apparent attempts to tell us as much, but it’s hollow and vain. It’s Feminism 101.

Nightbitch needed to reach further in any direction. Be it horror, comedy, or biting drama. Instead, it takes a clumsy stab at all three, watering down their individual components. There’s one gag-inducing scene regarding an ingrown hair and true, crawling-out-of-your-skin discomfort at a particular dinner scene. And while we laugh at the image of Adams running alongside other dogs through the streets, it never seems like we’re laughing with her but at her.

Perhaps that is the film’s greatest sin. No matter the warmth and fragility Adams injects into this character, we never fully know her. It’s not even clear if the film likes her.

She had aspirations as an artist. She doesn’t regret having her son but regrets the toll it’s taken on her and the way society chooses to undervalue and diminish the immense physical trauma women undergo in producing life. She’s annoyed with her husband but not enough to entirely demonize him. She’s contradictory, not in a way that makes her human, but inconsistent.

Adams truly is excellent, however, and brings a real sense of normalcy to Mother with a natural grace in her physicality that suggests the internal unhappiness she suffers. She’s most confident when playing with her son, loose and wild, as she plays as if she’s already transformed into a wild beast, encouraging him to play along. But even there, the hints of surrealism only go so far before that whiff of fantasy is buried for another paper-thin monologue about the wonders of womanhood.

The complicated nature of rage never gets its due

I have a complicated relationship with anger and see it as a necessary tool in my arsenal that protects me while also seeing how it can lead to self-destruction. It’s part of why female rage is such vital viewing both to me and, I’m sure, plenty of other women. For some, there’s value in Nightbitch and its simple, stripped-down platitudes about how hard it is to be a woman.

It is. The film isn’t wrong there. But there’s such nuance, such boundless possibilities in telling these types of stories, and Nightbitch, despite its off-kilter premise, doesn’t reach the peaks of storytelling possibilities despite the air of self-importance.

It needed to dig beneath the surface. Instead, the plot wraps itself up into a neat and tidy bow that nearly sacrifices any and all work that Mother puts into reinvigorating her life. By the time the blissfully brief film is over, there’s little room for rumination on what the character goes through.

Ultimately, it feels like she’s come full circle. It’s a shame that Heller didn’t approach the story with a more scathing, unflinching lens. It’s a shame that Husband isn’t cast as unfavorably through bizarrely shot close-ups as Mother is.

Some moments work, no doubt. But Adams is truly the only worthwhile element. Nightbitch needed to sharpen its fangs, but instead, like Barbie before it, it plays it safe when talking about womanhood, feminism, motherhood, and what it means to escape the patriarchy and keep true to yourself. The only anger at the end is directed at a film that fails to live up to its title.

Nightbitch is out now in theaters.