Directing: B
Acting: A-
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B

I’ll give Nightbitch this much: it’s deeply engaging from start to finish. Some of the time you may not quite understand what’s so compelling about it, or indeed what the overall point is, but it’s still engaging.

It’s also very, very odd. It’s a layered film, in that it has layers of oddness. One particularly odd thing is how it moves back and forth from being a little too on the nose, and being metaphorically opaque.

This is the story of a woman (Amy Adams) who turns into a dog, after all. It’s confusing to her at first, but ultimately becomes her means of being set free, specifically from her resentment toward motherhood being far more overwhelming than she expected. Why a dog? You got me there. It occurred to me that it was possible I was having a gendered reaction to this heavy-handed yet unclear metaphor—I cannot have children, so who am I to judge? Sort of to my relief, it appears that other critics’ reviews of this film are pretty evenly mixed between the genders, whether they quite liked it or they didn’t.

The script, co-written by director Marielle Heller, is far more muddled than the previous feature film for which she wrote the script, The Diary of a Teenage Girl. And if the script isn’t great, it matters less when everything else is great. Nightbitch opens with the mother and son at the grocery store, and when another young mom sees her and asks how she’s doing, she immediately fantasizes about unloading all of her frustrations. It is no doubt very relatable to just about any mother, but also filled with sentiments we have heard many times over. One might even be tempted to call it deeply unoriginal.

The curious thing with Nightbitch is that Amy Adams’s stellar performance makes up for far more than it ought to. She’s incredible in this movie—both as a frustrated mother, and as a woman turning into a dog at night. She bites into this role with no vanity, giving us a performance on film more memorable than anything she’s done in nearly a decade. Nightbitch is almost worth seeing just for her alone.

I’m glad I saw it, anyway. I’m not going to urge anyone else to rush out and see it. I do love that Heller is uninterested in taking any particular moral stance on motherhood: there is no judgment here, and if there is anything done deftly in this script, it’s the adorable little boy (played by twins, Arleigh and Emmett Snowden), who is never anything but a perfectly normal toddler. There are no “special needs” or unusually challenging behaviors that set the mother off the edge. He won’t fall asleep when he wants her to, just like virtually any other kid. This is about motherhood being overwhelming no matter what the kid is like, and Nightbitch exists only to empathize with that—and with the quiet cluelessness of a husband (Scoot McNairy) who assumes he’s being supportive while never truly seeing the burdens of parenthood that he rarely thinks to engage with.

All of that is what I understand about Nightbitch. It’s the whole dog business that throws me. She develops heightened senses, particularly of smell, and starts to attract other neighborhood dogs to her door, who bring her dead animals as offerings. She starts to deeply hate the household cat, which makes for a few moments of good comedy even if it’s a little weirdly off the mark: dogs tend to be very affectionate toward cats if they are part of the same household. There’s a particular group of three dogs that keep coming around, and I began to wonder if other women are turning into dogs too, and perhaps we are meant to understand these dogs are actually the three other moms that keep chatting up our protagonist at the storytime group she brings her son to. But, there is never any clarity on this.

I do wish Heller had drawn a bolder line between what might be merely in this mother’s imagination, and how “real” what she’s going through actually is. The mother tells her husband about strange hair growths, but never shows him the tail that starts growing out of her lower back, or the extra sets of nipples that appear on her abdomen. The husband just keeps moving along in blissful ignorance, which I suppose is part of the point.

There are no named characters in Nightbitch’s primary family, by the way—this is why I have not referred to any of them by name here. Amy Adams is credited as “Mother”; Scoot McNairy as “Husband,” and the different types of descriptors there seems very deliberate. The little twin boy actors are credited as “Son.” Even in flashbacks, Kerry O’Malley is credited as “Mother’s Mother.” There’s something to this, how family roles erase previous identities. Again, it could have been illustrated with greater clarity.

Mother does use the word “Nightbitch” at one point in the film, because of her getting snippy with the Husband in the middle of the night when it’s only reasonable he take a turn dealing with the boy. Heller then very much literalizes the idea, and turns Mother into a bitch. Maybe the idea is that being a bitch is surprisingly freeing—although, as a dog, Mother sure sprints through the streets in the middle of traffic a lot. If this happened in real life, she’d get run over by a car her first night out. Even this interpretation of “bitch” as a metaphor has no clean application, however, as Mother is only a bitch in the behavioral sense a couple of times. She turns into a dog to get some space away from the tedious frustrations of motherhood, which is pretty distinct from being a bitch. Then again, many people would judge such a woman to be a bitch whether it’s fair or not, so maybe I’m walking right back into the point here.

There’s some real weight to that maybe though, when Nightbitch is arguably—and admirably—Marielle Heller’s most ambitious work to date, but also her most challenging to make clear sense of.

Overall: B