Within the first 30 minutes of the magical realist dramedy “Nightbitch,” Amy Adams, starring as a newish parent teeming with fury and resentment, discovers that the oozing pustule that appeared on her back contains what appears to be a tail, the clearest sign yet that she is transforming into a dog.
Yet, unlike the protagonists in most body transformation movies, Adams meets the metamorphosis not with horror or shock, but with a general curiosity, an almost radical acceptance of who she is now.
“It’s a further manifestation of what had already happened through pregnancy and post- pregnancy and nursing,” Adams said in a joint interview with the director, Marielle Heller. “It was just one more thing, ‘Oh, look, I’ve got hair growing in weird places.’ I feel like we all get to that point where we stop judging things. I’m not horrified anymore by anything. I’m just like, well, there’s that.”
That somewhat serene validation by Adams’s character, called simply Mother in the credits, is what propels “Nightbitch.” This surreal examination of how motherhood changes a woman physically and emotionally is based on the novel of the same name by Rachel Yoder. Her husband is traveling for work for days at a time, and she has given up her successful career as an artist to care for their sleep-resistant toddler. Most days are tedious and exhausting until she meets a group of moms struggling with similar challenges. Her canine metamorphosis, rather than being painful and monstrous, is an almost euphoric journey of self-discovery, one that has been off-putting to some viewers and revelatory to others.
“With a title like ‘Nightbitch,’ people are coming in really expecting a full-on genre horror film and every bit of this movie is subverting expectations,” said Heller, whose credits include “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” and “The Diary of a Teenage Girl.” Over lunch, she and Adams had a wide-ranging conversation that touched on the challenges of being a parent today, including the identity issues that often accompany motherhood and the difficulty in rebalancing equality with your partner. “It’s subverting expectations that you have of mothers and it’s subverting expectations of how you as an audience are going to feel while you watch it.”
“There’s conscientious discomfort. I’m trying to play with those feelings and toe that line,” Heller added. “The silences are purposeful. The discomfort that she’s feeling within her own body is palpable. The moments where the tension between the partners is unspoken, but it’s just happening.”
One thing is certain: People don’t leave the theater without a reaction.
After a recent screening, a man approached Adams to ask if she had considered making a movie about a father “who has to go to work and worries if he can support his family or not,” a query both she and Heller responded to with guffaws. Heller said she had fielded a similar question from another male viewer asking, “When do we get the husband’s movie?”
“Luckily I was too tired to be rageful,” Adams said.
Heller began collecting what she called “defensive male responses” from the anonymous test screenings conducted by her studio, Searchlight Pictures. “People would write: ‘I don’t like how it made it seem like it was the husband’s fault.’ or ‘I didn’t like how that made me feel,’” she said.
“I’m like, ‘Sorry, white male, 47.’”
The film, which was shot in Los Angeles back in 2022 and delayed because of last year’s strikes by actors and writers, is proving to be something of a Rorschach test: different audiences find different value in it. Heller, who has a son and a daughter, said a lot of older men responded “sweetly to the film,” with one in particular saying he felt as if he’d been parachuted “behind enemy lines,” and described the film as “a voyeuristic experience he wasn’t meant to see.”
Women’s reactions have been similarly mixed. Writing in Entertainment Weekly, Maureen Lee Lenker called the film “a brutally honest portrayal of motherhood,” while Meagan Navarro of Bloody Disgusting wrote that it “seems too scared of its own feral setup and defangs its righteous wrath too early.” A Variety report on the film’s premiere deemed it “too weird” with its “dog poop, cat killing and shower menstruation” to lure in Oscar voters.
“There’s a little part of me that wants to be like, ‘Don’t you think this discomfort is kind of interesting?’” Heller said.
Yet even the harshest critics are mesmerized by Adams as she plays against her frequent onscreen persona. The six-time Oscar nominee has been recognized for characters as varied as Lynne Cheney in “Vice” and a seductive con artist in “American Hustle,” but she is still most often linked to upbeat, plucky types, whether it’s the cheerful, naïve princess Giselle in “Enchanted” or the capable, centered Lois Lane in three DC Films featuring Superman.
In “Nightbitch,” she is all the things you don’t expect: angry, messy, bitter and very human (except when she’s not). In one memorable scene, she uses her hands to shovel meatloaf into her face without a shred of self-awareness, much to the delight of her 2-year old son (played by twins Arleigh and Emmett Snowden).
Adams worked with a movement coach to transform physically into a canine digging in the grass. She was so convincing that when Mother communes with a pack by making eye contact and walking strangely — a scene the dogs and their trainers had rehearsed — one animal lunged for her face. (Adams wasn’t injured. “I’m a Colorado girl,” she said. “They trained us with bears.” The dog was removed from the shot.)
Adams said she never questioned what Heller asked of her. “Everything we did, I tried not to overthink it and just get into this instinctive, animalistic place.”
Heller agreed: “Self consciousness would have been the death of that.”
Adams responded, “Like the death of the whole film.”
Heller added, “I also love that you’re willing to eat in this movie, and eat onscreen, because some actors won’t eat onscreen.”
“Or offscreen,” Adams responded with a laugh.
When Mother goes out to dinner with friends from her previous life as an artist, she’s hoping to reconnect to the life she left behind; instead she feels invisible, her loneliness palpable when she has little to contribute to the conversation. Trying to play the part of her former self, she stuffs a kale salad down her throat, when, all the while a meat-loving, feral beast is bubbling up from within.
It’s one of Heller’s favorite scenes in the movie. She told Adams, “You got to kind of rip off the facades that we tend to walk around with as women about how well we’re keeping it all together.” It’s also the scene that seems to have burrowed into Adams’s psyche.
“That betrayal of self leads to a deep identity crisis and feeling invisible and insignificant,” said Adams, who has a 14-year old daughter and three dogs.
She took on the role at a time in her life when she needed it the most. She had just finished playing Amanda Wingfield in the West End revival of “The Glass Menagerie,” was bone tired and could relate to so much that her character in the film was feeling: the exhaustion, the need to please others, the shame for even feeling “mildly rageful.”
“I know for myself, there’s been times where I’ve just wanted to meet everybody’s needs or make everybody happy, or be a good girl,” she said. “Meeting Mother where I was, and getting to just bring the truth of where I was in that moment in my life, that was really freeing.”
Her husband, the actor and director Darren Le Gallo, also related to “Nightbitch,” according to Adams, crying at the end of the film when Mother’s husband, played by Scoot McNairy, offers up his apology. For the “protection” of her relationship, she wouldn’t divulge examples of how the film spoke to her own marriage, except to say, “He knows that I know and I know that he knows the moments where I fell into that deep rage.”
At that recent screening, another audience member asked Adams how she was able to play this character who was so seemingly different from her.
“I was like, ‘You might want to have a conversation with my husband,” she said. “He might deeply disagree.”
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