Nightbitch

I Am Woman hear me... bark? Amy Adams' latest is an tonally uneven mashup of comedy and body horror

Film Review by Lucy Fitzgerald | 03 Dec 2024
  • Nightbitch
Film title: Nightbitch
Director: Marielle Heller
Starring: Amy Adams
Release date: 6 Dec
Certificate: 15

Think The Shaggy Dog. Think Ingmar Bergman's Scenes From A Marriage. Think any insufferable Amy Schumer pop feminist movie. Mix all of these disparate works together and you get Nightbitch, a tonally unstable comedy/body horror that doesn’t have much teeth.

Amy Adams plays an exhausted mother doing the thankless work of rearing a toddler largely alone in suburban tedium. She is a domestic martyr: unfulfilled having sacrificed her professional ambition as an artist and constantly attentive to everyone but herself. She cleans up weapons-grade messes in the kitchen every day and tolerates a caricaturally unhelpful husband.

But then, she experiences a spiritual and physical metamorphosis. Adams transforms into a red husky and taps into an unprecedented sense of freedom as she roams the suburban streets at night. She re-discovers her infinite power. Guided by her female ancestral line (all stupidly manifesting as dogs watching over her in the park), the film speaks to the inherited pain of the female condition, I guess…

Interstitially Nightbitch is affecting, but largely it suffers from Barbie Essentialist Syndrome: spending a lot of time on rudimentary Feminism 101 soliloquies of soporific impact. The heavy-handed monologues are as radical in their insight as Florence Given’s first book, ultimately leaving you questioning, Who is this for? 

The film’s presentation of its grand thesis – Woman Has Multitudes! – is amusingly uninspiring. I wish it fully leaned into the freakish potential of its animating substrata; I wish it really sat in the dark contemplation of *the beast*. Nightbitch is simply not weird enough or smart enough, and to put a bow on the film’s identity crisis, there’s Weird Al Yankovic soundtracking. Woof.


Released 6 Dec by Disney; certificate 15