‘Nightbitch’: Amy Adams’ Transformation Into a Dog (Really!) Is a Surprising Triumph
TORONTO, Canada—Amy Adams is great and yet her career choices over the past few years—including Vice, Hillbilly Elegy, The Woman in the Window, and Dear Evan Hansen—have been anything but. Nightbitch, thankfully, reverses that trend.
A magic-realist fable about motherhood, identity, transformation, and the brutality and bliss of creating and cultivating life, writer/director Marielle Heller’s adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s novel, which just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival ahead of its Dec. 6 theatrical release, has an eye-catching title and a unique spirit to back it up. Resembling a bonkers marriage of Young Tully and Teen Wolf, and led by a ferociously naked and unafraid performance by its star, it’s an amusingly incisive howl of maternal pain, frustration, disappointment, resentment, and feral strength.
Adams’ unnamed Mother spends her mornings frying up breakfast for her adorable and unruly young Son (Arleigh Patrick Snowden and Emmett James Snowden), her days taking walks with him to the playground, and her nights vainly trying to get him to go to sleep beside her. Though she clearly cares for him, the monotony of her suburban existence, which she’s chosen over her past career as a celebrated New York artist, is causing her to slowly come apart at the seams.