****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS PLOT POINTS AND MILD SPOILERS!! THEREFORE: THIS IS TECHNICALLY NOT A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!****
My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Flaccid and flavorless feminist gruel.
Nightbitch, starring Amy Adams, chronicles the weird and wild travails of a mother as she navigates raising a toddler, perimenopause and the modern world.
Nightbitch, which is written and directed by Marielle Heller and is adapted from the Rachel Yoder book of the same name, describes itself as a “black comedy horror” film. I take umbrage with that description since the movie is not funny, darkly or otherwise, nor is it horrifying….it’s just bad.
Nightbitch starts out in quite compelling fashion as Amy Adams’ character, simply named “mother”, struggles with the mind-numbing repetitiveness and inanity of raising a toddler, in this case her son, named, “baby”. Mother’s husband, who goes by the clever moniker “husband”, is away for work from Monday to Thursday so mother must do everything on her own.
A very interesting premise and a captivating first twenty minutes about the unique difficulties of raising a toddler quickly gets derailed when a tsunami of heavy-handed, insipid, intellectual and dramatic vapidity and vacuity around gender roles and modern-day feminism comes to the fore.
The movie shifts from arthouse realism into the mire of symbolism and surreality, as mother starts to show the early signs of morphing into a dog. Again, this could’ve been a nice segue into a “body-horror” type of cinematic exploration, but instead this metamorphosis ultimately is used just as “woman tapping into her primal power” symbolism, which is about as original, interesting and captivating as watching a dog take a shit on your lawn.
This movie could have, and frankly should have, been a serious and slightly comedic meditation on how devastatingly difficult it is for women to mother a toddler in the modern world. Or it could have, and should have, been a body horror film about a woman losing herself, physically, mentally, emotionally, and artistically to motherhood and menopause/middle-age. But it is neither…it is a pitiful and pedantic tantrum by a middle-aged woman angry at her intellectual and artistic impotence and her career and familial failures and needing to blame anyone but herself.
It is also so archetypally and mythologically obtuse and contrary to collective human consciousness and conditioning as to be astounding. For example, why is a woman seeking to connect with her primal power, morphing into a dog? Dogs are pack animals and are usually led by an alpha male…so even in this feminist fantasy film, the dream is of being a male instead of an empowered female. Odd.
Another issue is the tone deafness of the class politics of the film. Mother, and all the mothers in the movie by the way, live some of the most privileged lives imaginable. They are rich enough to be afforded the option of not working and staying home to raise their children. This used to be standard operating procedure here in America, but in the last fifty years it has become a sign of rare privilege and less and less likely.
Mother is completely unaware of how spoiled she is as she lives this extraordinarily privileged life and yet still manages to wallow in her narcissistic melancholy and navel-gazing ennui. She is, at a minimum, an upper-middle class woman who can afford to not have a job and stay at home and raise her one child. The child, by the way, is so well-behaved as to be absurd, and yet still she can’t handle it.
This flaccid film is so unconscionably blind to class politics because it is designed to be nothing more than a vehicle for some of the most-trite and laughably moronic modern feminist politics imaginable.
The eye-rolling level of cringe in this movie becomes nearly unavoidable as it rolls along. For example, mother is an artist…because of course she is since she’s never actually worked a day in her life…and she’s also a former Mennonite…because of course she is because she has to be connected to some weirdly archaic lifestyle and religious background. And of course her husband is one of those pussified eunuchs who lacks both balls and any semblance of muscle tone or masculinity, who serves little to no purpose in mother or baby’s life except for supplying food, clothing and shelter.
The relationship between mother and husband says a great deal about the film. When mother and husband argue it’s because he’s an idiot and thoughtless and selfish, not because she is spoiled and irrational (which she is).
Mother was an artist “in the city” but wanted to stay home with the baby and gave up her career to do so. Husband is the bread winner….as they both agreed upon prior to the baby being born. But now she regrets that decision and somehow it is all husband’s fault for not being able to both read her mind and see into the future.
Mother decides she is unhappy and it’s all husband’s fault because he gave her everything she ever wanted…but it wasn’t what she wanted. So, she says raising this child on her own is too difficult so she wants to get separated…which will really solve the issue of being overwhelmed by having to take care of a child by yourself by removing the other adult in the equation. Brilliant….or should I say “great idea stupid bitch”.
And then…for some strange reason because he’s the one who makes money and has always been the one making money and it’s his fucking house…he moves out into an apartment complex with all the other divorced/separated dads. How about this nightbitch…it’s his fucking house and you’re the one with the problem, so you get the fuck out…how does that sound you hairy fucking mongrel? But no, Mr. Limp Dick puts his tail between his legs and goes to sleep in his race car bed in his studio apartment with all the other sad sacks at the singles complex. Pathetic.
Mother then spends her time getting back in touch with her primal nature – morphing into a dog and hunting with the pack late at night. She also spends time with other moms who all agree that “women are gods” and that “women create life!” The funny thing about this sort of bumper sticker feminism is that it is so stupid it makes my teeth hurt. For example, women don’t create life…men AND women create life…women carry it in their bodies after men inseminate them. Sort of a big difference. Also…why do I have to explain 5th grade biology to this idiotic movie?
Mother, now free on the weekends because exceedingly well behaved baby is busy overwhelming incompetent husband at the single’s complex, creates a massive amount of art that celebrates the power of mothers, and she puts on a big art show and presents in the suburbs. The art mother makes is so laughably bad, pretentious, derivative and trite it makes a toddler’s play-dough snake look like Michelangelo. The banal atrocity that is mother’s art is obvious to everyone watching the movie but apparently no one involved in making the movie. But the lesson of all this nonsensical junk is that mother can only be her true goddess self without that useless husband around…and even more menacingly…without that annoying baby occupying her precious time too.
On the bright side, Nightbitch is a wonderful encapsulation of how modern feminism teaches women to be deathly allergic to responsibility and to blame others for their personal, political, artistic and financial failures.
The “patriarchy” that the nightbitches scapegoat are made up of the rough men they love to loathe, but these are the men who carved out a place for these feckless women to live their silly, mindless, meaningless lives the way they choose…and yet still, all they can do is bitch about it.
Writer/director Marielle Heller, is one of those less-than-talented people who somehow, almost magically, con people into thinking they have actual talent. Trust me, she doesn’t have an ounce of it.
Nightbitch fits right in with Heller’s flimsy filmography, which includes Can You Ever Forgive Me? and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, because like all the other movies, it’s a mind-numbing, sub-mediocrity. It is poorly shot, poorly written, poorly executed and devoid of any real purpose or meaning except to pose as having a deep purpose or meaning.
Amy Adams is an actress I have always liked but she is on one hell of a streak of shitty movies. Her last decent movie was Arrival, and that was in 2016!
Adams dives right in to her role here as mother, and apparently gained weight for the role, which is ironic because the film is so philosophically and cinematically weightless.
She does the best she can with what she’s given but it never coalesces into a coherent or compelling performance. There is no arc, no insight, no genuine humanity or behavior. Everything feels like Amy Adams play-acting as a middle-aged feminist avatar.
Adams seems to be in a very disorienting career death spiral which started out with her aggressively attempting to finally win an Oscar after six nominations, and has morphed into her desperately flailing away in an attempt to save her moribund career.
Nightbitch was released into theatres on December 6th, which is ironic because that is one day before Pearl Harbor Day and this movie was a massive, massive bomb. The only difference between this movie and Pearl Harbor is that people paid attention to Pearl Harbor.
The film had a budget of $25 million and it made measly $170,000 at the box office. It didn’t make that its opening day, or even opening weekend, that’s how little it made in the entirety of its run. $170,000. YIKES!
A flop this bad and a box office bomb this big can be career death for a movie star and a moviemaker. Adams and Heller are on very thin ice going forward.
The film is now available to stream on Hulu…but as you may have guessed, you really don’t need to stream it. It’s stupid and even worse, it’s pointless AND gutless.
The topic of the struggle of motherhood in all its complexities is one ripe for exploration, but Nightbitch ain’t that. This movie is so toothless, so artless and so thoughtless, that it is anti-cinema made manifest. Avoid it at all costs.
©2025
