It’s always fascinating to watch the film adaptation of a book to try and see what changes were made in order to facilitate the transfer between mediums. This is doubly true when it’s a book that I didn’t really enjoy all that much. Now to be fair, Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch is a novel for and about new mothers, so there’s not much for me, a childless male, to relate to. Yet I found myself curious about the movie for a few reasons. First and foremost, it has body horror elements, which I adore. Secondly, Marielle Heller is a brilliant filmmaker. And finally, I needed to see this adaptation to see what visual elements could be mined from a novel that mostly consists of a woman’s internal monologue. Sure, there are a few plot beats to hit, but storywise it’s mostly just a mother expressing her frustrations to the reader many times over. Thoughtful, yes, but cinematic?
Enter Marielle Heller, whose filmography suggests she’s the perfect candidate to find something outwardly cinematic in an inwardly pointed text. From her imaginative application of Mr. Rogers’ iconography in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood to her use of honest-to-God rotoscoping in The Diary of an Teenage Girl, she clearly has the skills, the talent, and an eye for visuals that such a feat of adaptation would require. And for the most part, she’s successful.
This is largely due to some upgrades to the tone of the script. While Yoder’s novel has some wit to it, Heller’s adaptation leans much more heavily into comedy. This humorous streak is punctuated by the performers as well as by the film’s structure. Heller finds more than a few visual punchlines in the edit, bringing needed levity to a somewhat dour tale (I should note that I read Nightbitch via audiobook, so my personal gauge on the level of comedy might be different based on the tone of the reader, which was one of exasperation and irritability).
Alas, exasperated is a great word to use as a jumping off point, because it’s exactly how our protagonist feels. Amy Adams plays the nameless Mother, a suburban stay-at-home mom who stepped away from her career as an artist to focus on raising her young son. Her husband (also no name, played by Scoot McNairy) is often away on business, leaving her to handle the immediate parental duties on her own. This agreed upon arrangement is starting to wear thin on both parties, but circumstances dictate that they’re just going to have to grin and bear it. And their lack of communication means that palpable frustrations are broiling just under the surface.
Also, Mother might be turning into a dog.
It starts with a little spots of hair and subtly sharpened teeth, and soon becomes a grid of nipples across her torso and the emergence of a tail on her rear end. These physical developments coincide with a heightened sense of smell, a desire to run through the bushes, and an appetite for raw meat, eaten without silverware. But the question remains: is this really happening to Mother, or is it just a visual representation of the creative beast she she so dutifully tamped down in exchange for parental bliss? The film keeps this ambiguous, as does the source material, but it’s one of the areas where it weakens the film relative to the novel. What I mean to say is that if you’re going to do a “woman turns into a dog” movie, you don’t have to be afraid to go all the way with it. It can still be ambiguous while also properly serving up the gross body horror inherent to the concept. As it plays out in the film, it feels like a half-measure. For a movie that’s ostensibly about a woman morphing into a canine, this transformation plays a remarkably small part in the story.
The focal point is instead about the lack of communication between Mother and Husband. To this end the script is very effective, and both Adams and McNairy do wonderful work, yet it feels like a separate film from all the Nightbitch stuff, which mostly sits on the back burner alongside another thread involving a crew of fellow moms who befriend Mother at Book Babies, an event for parents and little ones at the local library. This crew of lively young moms are a real hoot, and Mother begins to suspect that they may also suffer from a similar malady — are the friendly, free range dogs at the park actually her new human friends in canine form? The source novel explores this deeper, even going so far as to relate the look of each dog to their human counterpart, but the film only dances around the idea before abandoning it entirely. It’s another area where the script feels a rewrite or two away from fully coming together. This feeling runs through much of the film. A host of clever ideas are paid lip service to, but are never fleshed out in service of either plot or theme. There are a lot of dangling threads that a more committed film would work to tie up.
Even so, Nightbitch is thoroughly enjoyable if not fully satisfying, and to look at it as a feat of adaptation provides more meat to chew on than to just view it as its own thing. The book feels overcooked, repeating its themes ad nauseum, struggling to reach a proper length, whereas the film feels undercooked, and in need of the book’s cynical edge. The film proves to be the superior beast, but its weaknesses highlight the book’s strengths — one of which is the truly showstopping final scene … which has been removed from the film entirely. It’s a bummer too, because it’s exactly the type of horror-adjacent gnarliness that the concept promises, and that Heller could really go wild with on screen.
At just over 90 minutes in length, Heller’s film never wears out its welcome, which makes me wonder why it couldn’t be a little longer and more fleshed out. That said, it does make its point: that the physical, mental, and emotional toll of childbirth and child-rearing is frequently overpaid by the mother while the father is frequently given more opportunity to stop and exhale. It’s a brilliantly stated concept, even if the film seems reductive toward the father’s plight in the same way it admonishes our culture for doing to matriarchs. By the end of the film I don’t get the sense I’m supposed to be on the husband’s side (ideally, there wouldn’t be a side), but the picture painted of Mother isn’t one as aspirational as the film seems to think. I won’t spoil, but while “in dog form” our hero unambiguously does something unforgivable that I couldn’t move past (unless it was made absolutely clear that she’s definitely turning into a dog — a confirmation which would likely cause the movie to crumble anyway). Again, a few strokes of the pen could easily fix this issue.
But maybe I’m bringing my own baggage to things?
Either way, Nightbitch is a film worth seeing and thinking about. And it features what may be the only Weird Al needledrop in history that isn’t in a movie that features or is about Weird Al himself. This is a praise-worthy achievement in my book, as is getting a performance from a child (or in this case, twins playing one child) that accurately captures how young children can alternate from cute to horrifying and back again in a single breath.
Directed by Marielle Heller
Written by Marielle Heller, based on the novel by Rachel Yoder
Starring Amy Adams, Scoot McNairy, Jessica Harper, Archana Rajan
Rated R, 99 minutes
