Who Let the Dog Out: NIGHTBITCH

Its title suggests it could be some combination of David Cronenberg body horror and John Waters provocation and Universal Monster Movie metaphor. But Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch is, after all, a Marielle Heller movie, and therefore up to something more intimate, contained, and subtle. It atypically speaks its thesis loud and proud, early and often, but does so as a quiet domestic drama indulging the occasional flight of magical realist fantasy. Heller is the writer-director who gave us the warm-hearted A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood—a sideways Mr. Rogers’ biopic via appreciation by watching his ethos warm an unsuspecting journalist’s heart—and the prickly Can You Ever Forgive Me?—a con woman publishing story that balances mordant humor and real empathy for its desperate and unpleasant lead character. Those movies feature strong, specific performances that enliven their characters with nuanced observation of their situations. Nightbitch is similarly wedded to a strong lead performance as Amy Adams plays a stay-at-home mom who starts to suspect she’s turning into a dog at night. It’s an obvious metaphor for motherhood as a time of transformation that can leave a person unfamiliar to themselves. This mother used to be an artist, and now spends her days alone tending to her angelic son’s every need. He’s not a difficult kid; he’s just two years old. Her husband (Scoot McNairy) is often away for work, and when he’s home rarely offers to help, and needs lots of help himself even when he does. We get montages of her repetitive schedule, moments of loving connection with the child interspersed with receptive tasks and building frustrations. She makes mistakes, she harbors resentments, and harbors resentments for the way a mistake—not committing to breaking her son’s co-sleeping habit, say—can get harder to fix the longer she lacks the patience to do so.

We hear her inner monologue full of frustrations and resentments, toward her husband, toward the other moms in her social groups, toward her former artist colleagues, and especially toward herself. It’s a picture of motherly obligations and duties, fleeting satisfactions, and growing depression. She’s in a crisis of self-worth in a life of unbalanced routines. All of this is so precisely noticed and complicatedly enacted—it’s a real, messy, complicated picture of a woman trying to rediscover herself after growing alienated and isolated through the process of giving birth—that the whole dog transformation thing is both too much and not enough. It’s never a full-bore high-concept horror comedy—imagine the cult classic we’d have from the 80s or 90s with this premise, where people would feel smart for saying actually it’s about the conflicted emotions of motherhood—although it’s best in those moments when it emerges as an awkward social moment. Instead, the high concept is rather thinly stretched, mostly playing as separated embellishments of (sometimes gross) fantasy, moments where she imagines a taste of animalistic freedom that matches the burbling bodily transformations that have made her seem different in every way, and which she must reconcile to become her new, best self. Adams is really good at embodying those contradictions and making them work.