by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $15.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Amy Adams, Scoot McNairy, Jessica Harper
Intro:
… may not be as audacious as its title may suggest, but its treatise on modern womanhood is a breed of its own.
Is it possible to make a horror film that… isn’t a horror film? Not a film that’s trying to be scary but fails (we got plenty of those), but a film that takes the kind of emblematic championing of the grotesque and monstrous often found within the genre and its fanbase, and transplants it into a story that isn’t supposed to be scary. More to the point, should it be done, considering the act might involve losing the subversive edge that makes it resonate?
If any modern director could pull it off, Marielle Heller has a better chance than most. Her last film, the Mister Rogers biopic A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, used the make-believe aesthetic as a cushion for a much darker story about abuse and the power it takes to forgive. And with her latest, we have a stay-at-home mom (Amy Adams) whose internalised dissatisfaction with her domestic life leads to her transforming into a dog at night. It’s like splitting the difference between Tully and Ginger Snaps.
As dissonant as those two ideas are, especially when presented with this much froth (albeit consistently funny froth), there’s a definite logic to it. It fully embraces the primal feminine much like Ginger Snaps or Julia DuCournau’s Raw, but actively objects to the idea that it should be feared. Instead, by fusing imagery from fairy tales, cultural anthropomorphism, witchcraft, and religious conservatism, it shows that fear of femininity is what creates these (and even worse) problems in the first place.
Much like the story beats, the presentation is likewise caught between two worlds. Heller’s direction is quite elegant in its layering of the idea of embracing the inner bitch, while the dialogue is blunt and direct about how the ‘trad wife’ approach to parenthood isn’t sustainable for us as a species. Amy Adams always manages to shine, even when the scripts don’t (The Woman in the Window, Hillbilly Elegy, Nocturnal Animals), and she expertly portrays both the existential angst of giving up her passions for a family, and the genuine love she has for that family. It may feel like she’s trying to recreate Barbie’s deprogramming monologue at times, but there’s an honesty to her performance and the words themselves that still show through the messiness of the presentation. They arguably turn that same messiness into the core message: Why should a woman’s story be just one thing?
Nightbitch may not be as audacious as its title (and mindfrag-inducing trailer) may suggest, but its treatise on modern womanhood is a breed of its own. It runs past the surface concerning a woman’s right to choose her life direction, and openly snarls at the societal and artistic factors that can inform or, more often, dictate those choices. The way that the presentation, genre, and overall message keep clashing with each other is more fascinating than it is distracting, and coming from a director so adamant about showing that women can indeed have it all, its sheer existence overrides any major curiosity about how it might’ve looked with a darker coat.
