Day of the ‘Nightbitch’

“I feel like I’ll never be smart again,” Amy Adams laments in one of this year’s smarter (and stranger) efforts of real filmmaking, Marielle Heller’s domesticated werewolf allegory Nightbitch. It’s full of real ideas both thematic and formal, the most poignant of which at its most abstract is the mental dulling that accompanies adult obligation, particularly motherhood.

The film follows new mom and former gallery sculptor Adams. She fears her situation is degenerating her into a dog. Obviously there is nothing new under the sun, but the film truly feels like the first to interrogate the civilizational paradox of Woman as an animal. However, it’s no rote pro-careerist feminist screed; Heller respects the biology of the matter most saliently in the obvious affection Adams shows for her adorable son in what are largely improv scenes, perhaps the smartest use of the oft-maligned technique of improv in the cinema since Mike Leigh.

Scoot McNairy’s husband character is no strawman either. The ideas of the film, of the biological necessity of parenthood subsuming the self, and the very realization that you simply belong to a species, are just incredibly compelling. It gradually dawns on the characters that they are, in the universal scheme of things, easily categorizable and mechanical-sexual meat. Under this framework, “dehumanization” just means the subtraction of humanity’s most abstract personality-based, elements not their corporeal ones.

The delivery of these ideas is pretty interesting too. The film is “prefab cult” in its gonzo premise, but unlike the laziest gonzo cinema, it doesn’t just weird you out and call it a day. Its metaphor is meaningful, intelligent camp, very 70s in its focus on adult issues, but without the grating self-conscious throwback tics of recent years. The restrained approach of Nightbitch to reality slippage fascinates: it begins with a soliloquy as fake-out dialogue and often digresses into that liminal mental space only to explode into truth, or at least what it frames as truth.

But it squares this with a genre conceit that never actually overtakes the domestic drama core. This makes for a really dislocating picture, which is quietly remarkable given how mundane its conflict actually is. Shinya Tsukamoto’s Kotoko, another hallucinatory film about new motherhood, is a probably better reference point than Ginger Snaps or The Babadook. 

One issue with the film lies in its resolution: it’s way too neat. A pat “life in balance” copout bow can hardly contain the wild dichotomy of wo/man it so thoughtfully conjures. It is a shame because a wackier finale could’ve vaulted this to something Great, but it almost makes its already unsteady fantastical asides more disturbing to not resolve them in an otherwise irrelevant conclusion. Regardless, this is one film preceded by a “weird” reputation that breaks the neogonzo mold and lives up to purported strangeness on a level far more productive than mere lurid iconography.

People have spilled much ink in the past excruciating decade about the need for female artists to faithfully depict their experience in popular art. So many narcisstic, shallow and maddeningly unselfcurious works have emerged from this ethos in every medium that it’d be nearly impossible to catalog even just the failures. As the culture has begun to realize the lack of fruit born by the identity-based navelgazing art paradigm, Heller, in Nightbitch, gives it one heck of a film to go out on. And it’s very funny, too.