The multiple Oscar nominee has some fun as a mother at the end of her tether but this unsubtle mix of comedy and horror doesn’t go far enough
the multiple Oscar nominee has some fun as a mother at the end of her tether but this unsubtle mix of comedy and horror doesn’t go far enough
hile memories of the film itself might fade all too fast, it’ll probably take a while to tire of repeating the phrase “Amy Adams is Nightbitch”. The six-time Oscar nominee, stuck on a limp, losing streak of late with anonymous try-hard misfires like, has taken on a goofy, lightly gory role in a film with one of the silliest, most attention-securing titles of the traditionally self-serious Oscar season.
Adams at least gets to have more fun than usual, playing a one-time artist who stepped back to take care of her son, moving from city to suburbs and swapping exhibiting at MoMA to frying frozen hash browns for breakfast. She loves her son deeply but also resents the role she’s now playing, struggling with a loss of identity and agency and sense of self, and failing to bond with the other mothers around her.
Her transformation from mother to dog does not go as deep into the gnarly body horror as the novel, and it’s a neutering that the film struggles with: a gonzo concept that’s left a little tame in execution. Film-makers have long used the horror genre to comment on the violence of birth and the otherness of parenting but the commentary here feels too surface-level and sitcom-y, Heller overusing the daydream format of Adams imagining her reaction, instead of living it.
But she’s hemmed in by a film that too often feels like a dated one-note sketch, pot shots at the big city and modern art and the basic nature of suburbia having now been made for far longer than the film would like to admit. There also seems to be a quick boredom with the central doggy conceit, pushed to the side for an increasingly sentimental ode to the magic of motherhood instead.
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