Nightbitch

Marielle Heller has adapted Rachel Yoder’s novel about a woman who used to make art and now makes dinner. Amy Adams plays her, and the credits call her only Mother. She lives in a suburb with her small son (Arleigh and Emmett Snowden share the part) while Husband (Scoot McNairy) travels for work all week and comes home at the weekend to be tired. Then she finds a patch of fur at the base of her spine, her teeth feel sharper, and the neighbourhood dogs start gathering on the lawn at night. Nightbitch is a comedy and a horror film about a woman becoming an animal, and it is much better at the woman than the animal. Adams is superb. The film is not, quite.

The first half hour is the sharpest thing Heller has written. Anne McCabe cuts between what Mother says and what she means: a bright “I love it” to an old colleague in the supermarket, then the same moment again with a two-minute account of what the last two years have done to her, then “I love it” once more. The days are shown as one day, eggs, playground, library, bath, the same book, the same song, cut short and tight so the routine wears a groove. We laughed a great deal in this stretch. By the fourth bath we had stopped, and we think that was intended.

Adams does the heavy work with her face and her posture. She lets her shoulders round, her hair go unwashed and her voice flatten into the tone of a woman who has not finished a sentence since the birth. When the dog comes through she plays it as relief: a sniff at a stranger, a snarl at a man who takes the last parking space, plain pleasure the first time she runs on all fours across wet grass. There is no vanity in it, and when she digs in the garden by moonlight with her bare hands we believed every second.

The horror does not come. There is fur, a tail, something unpleasant found in the garden one morning, but Heller cuts away from the body at the moment a horror film would move in. Brandon Trost shoots the house in flat, warm daylight, oatmeal walls and a kitchen strewn with plastic, and the nights in a soft streetlamp orange, so the dog is never once frightening. Karen Murphy dresses the spare room as the studio Mother no longer uses, canvases stacked against the wall, and that room says more about what she has lost than any of the voiceover. There is a great deal of voiceover. Adams reads us paragraphs about the animal self and the ancient and the sacred, each repeating what the scene has already shown, at greater length and in worse prose.

Jessica Harper’s Norma, a librarian who presses a book of mythical women into Mother’s hands, is warm and faintly sinister and is given almost nothing to do. Zoë Chao, Mary Holland and Archana Rajan play the mothers from the library group, first mocked, then embraced, in a change of heart the film wants more than it earns. McNairy plays Husband as a man who means well, which is truer than a villain would be and lets the film off. Nate Heller writes the score and plays the man leading the singalong at the library. His music is light and plucked and never suggests anything is wrong, which we took to be a decision.

Heller’s Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018) and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019) were about difficult people handled with patience, and patience is her gift. It is the wrong gift here. Yoder’s premise asks for teeth, and around the hour mark the film steps back from the transformation and into a marriage drama, with arguments about the dishes that could have been had without any fur at all. The second half takes a turn we will not describe. We will say that it settles in about ten minutes what the first hour had made feel impossible to settle, and that we were angrier about it than the film could have meant us to be.

See it for Adams, who is doing something braver than the film around her. At 98 minutes it does not overstay, and it plays better at home, where the voiceover feels less like a lecture. Motherhood is a bitch, runs the tagline. The film agrees, then apologises.