Sub-woofer: Adams’ fiercely engaging performance drives tame adult fairy tale
The provocatively and appropriately titled black comedy “Nightbitch” (it features a female dog) owes its narrative propulsion to Amy Adams’ harried, married, emotionally buried Mother of a 4-year-old boy, and wife of a benignly neglectful, stay-away-from-home husband.
In this disappointingly tame adult fairy tale — directed by Marielle Heller, based on Rachel Yoder’s 2021 novel — Adams’ character (referred to only as Mother) appears frumpy and grumpy, exhausted and burned out, at the end of her knotty rope.
When a friend asks her how she felt after giving birth, Mother launches into an elaborate, hilariously articulated speech on unrealized dreams, blunted potential, life disappointments, fears and desperation.
“My brain just doesn’t operate the way it did before I had the baby,” she says. “I’m dumb, now.”
(This is what she really wants to say, but she actually replies, “I love being a mom!”)
Mother’s Son (played by adorable twins Arleigh Patrick Snowdon and Emmett James Snowdon) proves to be a proverbial pistol, demanding her attention all the time, and dropping the F-bomb when asked to say his name at school.
Father (an economic, unfussy performance by Scoot McNairy) travels for his job. A lot. When he has a rare night at home, he barely speaks to his wife, seldom helping with domestic chores or raising their son.
One day, the repetitious daily grind pushes Mother to the point of primal screaming.
Instead, she begins turning into a dog.
This transformation takes time, starting with a growing tail, pointy canine teeth, and developing whiskers. Suddenly, neighborhood dogs start showing up at her house, dropping dead animals and pet poop at her doorstep.
Can this really be happening? Or has Mother contracted some sort of strange hallucinatory metaphor as a self-defense mechanism?
The movie offers ambiguous evidence to support both. Son spots that fuzzy thing growing out of her hiney, but Father notices nothing out of the ordinary when he takes a shower with Mother. Who’s the unreliable narrator?
After Mother becomes fascinated with her increased sense of smell and desire to dig holes in the yard with her hands, she consults a seer-like local librarian (“Suspiria” and “Shock Treatment” star Jessica Harper) for a motherhood instructional manual.
Instead, she gives Mother “A Field Guide to Magical Women,” a history celebrating strange connections between women and animals.
(What does it mean when men get wolves or lions as animal avatars in movies, but women get dogs? Because they’ve been domesticated?)
Mother’s frequent voice-overs and interior monologues fit right into the stream-of-consciousness advantages of a written novel, but in the more literal medium of motion pictures, tend to suppress options to tell this tale visually.
And do we really need the main character’s moral-to-the-story summary speeches to explain lessons learned? Especially when those lessons are little more than conventional bromides such as “better communication is the key to a successful relationship.”
Really? That’s the big takeaway?
Tossing aside vanity, an endearing Adams proves to be Heller’s strongest cinematic element, a driving force of anger and disillusionment searching for a way to remake her life so that it works, so that she might again become the artist and the person she abandoned to become a mom.
“I died in childbirth,” she says in the screenplay’s hardest-hitting line.
Fortunately, Adams twists her dialogue with just enough humor to make Mother’s most accurately depressive thoughts curiously amusing — all while reinventing herself as a model of dogged determination.
• • •
“Nightbitch”
2.5 stars
Starring: Amy Adams, Scoot McNairy, Arleigh Patrick Snowdon, Emmett James Snowdon, Jessica Harper
Directed by: Marielle Heller
Other: A Searchlight Pictures release. Rated R for language, sexual situations. 99 minutes