Certain people who (reasonably enough) felt Amy Adams wasn’t getting her due became agitated at the news, last year, that she was about to play a harassed mom who turned into a dog at night. What is she doing with her career?
In truth, Nightbitch sounded like a fabulous idea. Rachel Yoder’s source novel offers a raw, unfiltered snarl at the frustrations that can accompany staying at home with a young child. It was weird, surreal and original. With The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Can You Ever Forgive Me? and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Marielle Heller, the film’s director, has a perfect record in contrasting moods. And Amy Adams is Amy Adams.
Signs of trouble emerged before Nightbitch’s premiere at Toronto International Film Festival. An initial poster, showing a harried Adams with wild stare, looked to be honouring the book. Then an appalling trailer suggested we were about to get a knockabout lark in the style of a Disney family comedy from the 1970s. My Mom the Dog?
Heller’s film is not that. But this suspiciously short feature – have there been cuts? – loses almost everything that made the book disturbing. This is an inherently conservative film that, at every point, seeks to reassure the viewer that, though things may momentarily look weird, bourgeois order will eventually be restored.
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Adams, named only as archetypical “Mother”, is a former artist now living with archetypical “Husband” (Scoot McNairy) and archetypical “Son” (Emmett and Arleigh Snowden) in archetypical suburbs. Nothing Mother says or does convinces us that she was once part of an avant-garde downtown scene. But perhaps that’s the point.
With reasonable, if unoriginal, competence, the film soon establishes that the pressures of parenthood have pressed the rest of her life into a corner. Every other mother seems to juggle the tasks with elegant perfection. Nobody seems sufficiently grateful for her efforts. Husband, who gets to travel with his own job, is prone to wan protestations that he’d love to be a stay-at-home dad, but he mucks up all halfhearted efforts to help out. Not surprisingly, Mother starts to fray at the edges. The film’s best moment comes when her partner wonders what happened to the woman he married. “She died in childbirth!” Adams spits back.
The line promises a savagery that is never delivered. Yes, Mother does soon find herself being taken over by the canine spirit. She can smell with increased sharpness. Dogs notice her in the park. Odd scraps of fur break out on her flesh. She hungers for meat. For a few uneasy moments, it seems Nightbitch will embrace the sort of body horror we expect from David Cronenberg, but timidity sets in and that supernatural – or merely allegorical – strain is fast relegated to the background. Heller has given us a conventional drama that drops in on the book’s key premise when bored by its own lacklustre domestic comedy.
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Watching the film slowly fall to bits, one can’t help but compare with the BBC’s faultless sitcom Motherland (sadly, now in prolonged hiatus). That series, though ostensibly more conventional, was far sharper on the cruelties of even well-off parenthood and less sentimental about the moral compromises mothers find themselves contemplating. Though it offers its characters some comfort, it is not so dedicated to reassuring parents that everything will be all right, that everyone is well meaning and – most infuriating of all – that all these apparent aberrations are “in your head”. The term “gaslighting” is too often misused, but the close of Nightbitch really does feel like an exercise in that class of malign deception. Adams, as usual, gives it her all, but it’s as if Kafka’s Metamorphosis had been adapted as frivolous comic operetta.
In cinemas from Friday, December 6th
