Nightbitch

Nightbitch's surreal exploration of the wildness of motherhood and identity within patriarchy draws from the same traditions as works like The Substance and Dead Ringers and We Need To Talk About Kevin and Antichrist. If any of those strike as odd comparisons be aware that they are apt because Nightbitch is of an ilk that is off-kilter. It is unreliable and unstable. It is visceral and dark. It is taxidermy and what I think are freezer potato pancakes.

She is credited only as 'Mother' but Amy Adams is more than that. He is credited only as 'Husband' and Scoot McNairy's role is very carefully that, not father or partner or lover or another of what should be overlapping sets. Twins Arleigh Patrick and Emmet James Snowden are credited as 'Son' and while it's common to be played by pairs because of things like working time, it's also possible that one actual child cannot provide the quantity of chaos that the role requires.

Rachel Yoder's 2021 novel is in an anonymous place. While the film gives it slightly more grounding making it near a city with an arts scene the balance could be Boston or Chicago or New York or Paris or Barcelona or London or otherwise. The specific becomes the universal when things are repeated enough. Those who recognise the parks and the bars have said that its Los Angeles but that's a place so repeated and trackless that defining its suburbs becomes an exercise in taxonomy more than geography, like counting restaurants in Tokyo.

Boundaries and interpretation are important. It'd be churlish to find fault with how Nightbitch treats the handful of men in its story. Two do have a conversation that isn't about a woman, though the spaghetti is as much metaphor as it is on the floor. There's the bearded book baby boss, some making up numbers within the grad school set, but they are background. That narrowing of context and contact isn't uncommon and its part of the film's point.

Just as men too often suffer in silence the struggles of motherhood are too often considered to be par for the course. It's easy from a place of emotional safety to lament that suggestions are often interpreted as criticism, that criticism is often interpreted as attack. It's harder to recognise that expectation is part of the headwind against having it all, that every overlap on the Venn diagram of womanhood and motherhood and neighbourhood is a link in some societal shackles.

If one is to be collared then why not run free? That's the struggle for Adams as Mother, one made flesh (and often literally) by the work of makeup and special effects teams. Several animal actors too. Three dogs on a rise bear the same import as a murder of crows or Macbeth's witches. Temptation in a fur coat, the call of the wild. As with The Substance there are moments of horror that are rooted in flesh but the most powerful are not lancing of boils but latkes in butter. I am ever fond of detail and Nightbitch makes use of it everywhere.

A Field Guide To Magical Women: A Mythical Ethnography is brought over from the book, and there's a difference between a book being referenced in another book and a book appearing in a film. To turn narration into voice-over is an easy step for adaptations and I'm never sure it works. That old adage about 'show don't tell' is undercut by having someone tell us things. It's a small complaint, one that is outweighed by more satisfying acts of unreliability. There are some brilliant supporting turns, chief among them Jessica Harper as librarian Norma. In a long career she's often played roles that have been muses. As with her turn as Phoenix in Phantom Of The Paradise there's enough to understand how she can help birth a new sound, a new way of living.

Writer/director Marielle Heller's second feature as that hyphenate. 2015's The Diary Of A Teenage Girl was similarly based on a book, but found a different fix on femininity. She captured Mr Hanks as Mr Rogers, and here she's helped Amy Adams deliver something equally powerful. It's a role that rolls in the mud, the emissions of exhaustion, that patina of fatigue that marks the unweary.

The subtlety of tone includes Nate Heller's score, he's worked with his sibling several times before. There are some songs on the soundtrack that really stand out, chief among them Weird Al's Dare To Be Stupid. That Yankovic's 'style parody' of DEVO had such success is incredibly apt. With tongue only somewhat in cheek Mark Mothersbaugh has said "he re-sculpted that song into something else... and I hate him for it." I can't but read that element of bitterness into later scenes about the use of the word 'babysitting' or where variations of beige evoke the rental palette that conveys a sadness mere grey cannot.