Mireille Heller is a writer/director who has made some very good films in recent years including  A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood about Fred Rogers starring Tom Hanks, Diary of a Teenage Girl about an awkward girl coming of age and Can You Ever Forgive Me? About a woman who has an illegal secret.  Nightbitch might be her most personal of all though. It’s based on the novel by Rachel Yoder and is the latest starring role for 6-time Academy Award nominee Amy Adams. Always the bridesmaid, never the bride. 

Amy Adams plays a mother who’s married to the Scoot McNairy character. They have a little boy together. McNairy is the breadwinner of the family so he’s away at work a lot of the time. Adam’s character reluctantly gave up her burgeoning art career to stay at home and take care of their child. The problem is being a stay-at-home mom has started wearing on her and she has started to develop some unusual maternal instincts to cope with taking care of her son and being away from her husband for long periods. This is motherhood at its most basic. 

Adams is an actress who has had a great career. She’s been in everything from Batman v Superman: The Dawn of Justice to Julie & Julia, Arrival and The Fighter. It doesn’t matter what role she takes she melds into whatever character she plays. The mother character in this film might be the closest character to herself she’s ever played though. She has a teenage daughter and I’m sure she based some of her character on the experiences she has as a mother raising her and her husband’s daughter Aviana. She goes to another level in this role which I very much enjoyed. 

Heller and Adsms go the extra mile though to accentuate the motherly instincts of this character. As a metaphor for motherhood adapted from the book, the character adopts the nature of a dog. She starts to do things dogs would do such as eat out of a do bowl,  kill animals and bury them in the backyard, and even run with a pack of stray dogs in the neighborhood. These are all ways she chose to cope with her real life and co-exist with other mothers, specifically her husband who isn’t carrying his weight as a father in the relationship. This is as meta as it gets though regarding motherly qualities. Adams goes to another level as this character. I’m sure many mothers will be able to relate to her in this movie.

As an outside person looking in I was thrown aback by how authentic this film was about dealing with parenthood and specifically being a mother.  As a single man I don’t know much about raising a child or being in a long-term committed relationship, but I have close friends and family members that have had to deal with this type of situation. My sister has two children, my brother has three and a very close friend has two kids as well. I’ve been around these families while they’ve raised their children to some degree. By osmosis, I’ve seen a lot of what they’ve done to bring up their kids. I can honestly say it wasn’t easy for them. Even my mother had to raise four children. It was hard for her. I don’t envy any parent or mother who has to raise a child in this day and age. It has to be a genuinely overwhelming experience, to say the least.

Heller uses some interesting filmmaking techniques to make this movie flow. The editing is fast-paced at times to show how fast and unrelenting raising a child can be. A breakfast sequence is constantly gone back too over and over again as a way to show the repetitive nature sometimes of what a mother’s job is like. There are also dream sequences that show how this character feels in her situation as a mother and wife of a husband who doesn’t seem to understand what she’s going through until he gets a taste of his own medicine. The dreams are a bit out there, but they make complete sense in the context of the story. Heller uses these unique techniques very well in this film.

There are some parallel scenes to the journey the mother is going through when she meets a librarian friend and a group of mothers at “Book Baby” wear a guy who sings and reads books to children. These mothers are a bit out of their element until they show some different ways of thinking.  They can’t relate to the struggles of the Adams character as much, but eventually start to realize her pain in the end. All mothers have different experiences so finding friends you can commiserate with about similar issues regarding your children, husband, or life in general is better for them. Heller used these scenes extremely well to reiterate this in the context of the movie.

Nightbitch is a movie all mothers should see. It’s basically a roadmap for the struggles mothers go through regarding raising a child while their husbands are away at work. The minutiae of changing diapers, making them breakfast, and trying to get them to sleep at night all wear on a mother. It takes away from their sleep and starts to create health issues for said mother. It’s a bad cycle for many mothers. Heller captures these issues very well in the script adapted from the book by Yoder. Adams becomes this character, but I’m sure it wasn’t much of a stretch for her, who is married and has raised a child herself in the past. She gives a great performance in this role. This is a roadmap for mothers and people in general who are thinking of having children. It’s not an easy road for anyone involved. This movie dictates that perfectly well. It’s worth seeing if only for the great performance by Adams.

4 stars

Dan Skip Allen