Vague Visages’ Nightbitch review contains minor spoilers. Marielle Heller’s 2024 movie features Amy Adams, Scoot McNairy and Zoë Chao. Check out the VV home page for more film reviews.

Director Marielle Heller has described her adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s divisive novel Nightbitch as “a comedy for women and a horror movie for men.” All audiences, regardless of gender, will at least be able to agree that it is insufferable, functioning neither as a domestic comedy about the anxieties of motherhood or a body horror allegory for regaining one’s sense of self after it’s become defined by looking after someone else. Metaphor in genre cinema is supposed to help elevate a filmmaker’s insights on society and the human condition, allowing them to address hot-button issues with a bluntness that would be unsatisfactory if explored directly. What starts as an authentically stressful depiction of parenthood becomes far more confused once Nightbitch’s mother-as-werewolf allegory comes into play — an immediately unnecessary distraction that doesn’t offer new perspectives on themes the stripped-down family dramedy didn’t already provide.

Amy Adams stars as an unnamed mother, an actress who physically transforms to appear as a rundown, stay-at-home mom long before she embraces her inner canine. The opening 20 minutes of Nightbitch are largely plot-free, slice-of-life excerpts from the protagonist’s daily routine, which have an authenticity to them lacking elsewhere, and far more comic potential due to their grounded concepts. Awkward encounters with other moms at various parent and toddler groups, along with the unnamed woman’s inability to get a moment’s rest because of her husband’s (Scott McNairy) sheer uselessness, are hardly novel situational conceits, but they are at least handled with a jagged humor more concerned with putting an audience on edge than making them laugh. This early stretch of the film feels heavily inspired by the BBC’s sitcom Motherland (2016-22), a series which, similar to the first act of Nightbitch, is content giving audiences the contact high of parental anxiety as it examines familiar domestic irritations through an off-kilter lens. Of course, that show never leans into a horror framework because it doesn’t need to, as Motherland already puts the audience on edge simply by putting them in its protagonist’s shoes. By adding a horror angle to this set-up, Nightbitch makes the notorious comedy writing sin of putting a hat on a hat.

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The protagonist’s physical transformation in Nightbitch begins without warning; her young son notices hairs sprouting on her back, and soon the woman spots transformations to her teeth and stomach while experiencing a heightened sense of smell. It becomes immediately clear that, as a motherhood metaphor, this is lacking. As a sign of the physical toll it takes, the de-glamorized makeover the A-lister Adams received previously signaled this without the use of horror movie prosthetics, and as a signifier of liberation from society’s demands that all mother’s must be without fault, it never has any ramifications on the plot itself. The screenplay is generally confused as to how seriously viewers should take the metamorphosis, with some characters noting physical changes and others remaining oblivious, meaning it can’t even be enjoyed as a body horror at face value. It’s a metaphor with no idea how to function as a face-value conceit within the film’s reality, constantly asking the audience to read between the very obvious lines to decipher its shallow empowerment messages.

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While I have my own criticisms of The Substance (2024), aired on this very site a few weeks back, Coralie Fargeat’s film could never be accused of pulling punches when it comes to marrying an unsubtle feminist message with gross-out body horror. Nightbitch is all empty message and no provocation, its few shots of a fully transformed protagonist shocking only because of how little effort was made beyond giving Adams some contact lenses for a split-second, before a dog is shown running around in her place. There are frequent suggestions her pup alter-ego is killing other animals and acting destructively around her neighborhood, but this too has zero ramifications and is left offscreen. Heller, whose previous films have been more self-consciously “prestige” projects, seems to have an aversion to the lowbrow thrills that are essential to make a premise like this function, only affording her lead the chance to lose all inhibition when the woman and her son pretend to be dogs together. It’s hardly what an audience would desire from a conceit which, at the very least, suggests horror-comedy if not all-out-body-horror. The lack of interest in viewing this transformation through this lens is key to why Nightbitch falls so spectacularly flat. At a time when The Substance has proven the mainstream is comfortable with a movie that unpacks the messiness of womanhood in such a visceral, off-putting way, a film that tries to be more tasteful than is necessary for its silly conceit could only ever be unsatisfying.

Alistair Ryder (@YesitsAlistair) is a film and TV critic based in Manchester, England. By day, he interviews the great and the good of the film world for Zavvi, and by night, he criticizes their work as a regular reviewer at outlets including The Film Stage and Looper.

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