Credit: Disney+
Film
Nightbitch: Amy Adams delivers a mesmerising performance in this darkly comic exploration of motherhood
Updated 2 months ago
3 min read
“Amy Adams delivers a brilliant and potentially award-winning performance in Nightbitch, in which she explores the heightened emotions and questions of identity that can come with motherhood.”
Amy Adams turning into a dog was not on my bingo card for this year, and yet here we are, because that’s exactly what happens in the actor’s new thriller, Nightbitch.
It’s been a little while since we’ve seen Adams in a gritty but fun role, but here she delivers a brilliant and potentially award-winning performance in which she explores the heightened emotions and questions of identity that can come with motherhood and being a new parent. Loving your child but disliking motherhood is a tricky balance to strike and portray on screen, but Adams finds this balance and conveys this emotion so brilliantly in the film.
The protagonist, known only as ‘Mother’ (played by Adams) is struggling to raise a toddler in the suburbs, often on her own. Isolated, lonely and exhausted, the new parent slowly embraces an animalistic power deeply rooted in motherhood. She loves her son deeply but seems to resent the role she’s now found herself in, especially as she can’t seem to bond with the other mothers around her. As she begins to fear losing her own humanity and taps into her anger and rage, she becomes increasingly convinced through bizarre and undeniable signs that she may be turning into something less human and more canine.
Credit: Searchlight
Adapted from Rachel Yoder’s 2021 novel of the same name, Nightbitch is a darkly comic exploration of motherhood and the societal expectations that come with it. One of the opening sequences highlights the monotonous nature of being a mother by showing Adams’s character and her son effectively reliving the same day over and over again. The same breakfast. The same mornings watching the bin lorry drive down their road. The same playtime in the local park.
Directed by Marielle Heller, it’s a film that could so easily have fallen into becoming a story about how awful parenthood can be, but Nightbitch never does this. Mother’s love for her child shines through in every scene, proving that multiple emotions can exist at once – even if they wildly contrast with each other.
My slight gripe with this film is that the animalistic and feral part of the story doesn’t go far enough on screen. Mother’s transformation from human to dog doesn’t go as deep into the body horror element as the novel does, and as a result, the primal and mythological part of the story falls a little flat. On top of this, the canine component of Nightbitch feels as though it’s been pushed to the side slightly to make room for Adams’s character imagining her reaction to certain events (like a thoughtless comment from her husband or her art friends making a career dig at the dinner table) instead of leaning into the animalistic. I wanted it to be bizarre, weird and freaky; instead, the narrative leaned away from the gore and horror.
Nightbitch is nevertheless well worth a watch. Adams’s character is complicated, relatable and sometimes unlikable. The actor taps into the complex emotions around motherhood brilliantly and really stretches herself physically in portraying the rawness of it all. Watching Adams eat out of a dog bowl or messily tear into another diner’s burger will stay with me for a while.
It’s a story that showcases the extreme highs and lows of motherhood, the magic and the mess, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see Adams on a few award shortlists in the next couple of months.
Images: Searchlight
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