In the opening scene of the intriguingly visceral and occasionally jarring but heavy-handed social satire “Nightbitch,” the marvelous Amy Adams as the mother of a toddler son is roaming the aisles of a suburban grocery store when she bumps into a younger woman named Sally (Adrienne Rose White), who took over her job at an art gallery so she could be a full-time, stay-at-home mother.
“Do you just love getting to be at home with him all the time? Must be so wonderful,” says Sally, who looks fabulous in a stunning green dress and hair/makeup as if she’s about to hit the town, as opposed to Mom in her rumpled, oversized denim get-up.
“That’s a good question,” comes the reply. “It’s complicated, though, because I would love to feel content, but instead I feel like I’m just stuck inside of a prison of my own creation where I torment myself until I’m left binge-eating Fig Newtons at midnight to keep from crying. And I feel like societal norms and gender expectations and just plain old biology have forced me to become this person that I don’t recognize …”
The rant continues on until we pull back and see Sally asking the question again, leaving us to conclude that what we just heard was all inner monologue. We’re barely two minutes into the movie, and yet on some level, that’s pretty much the movie: The great Amy Adams playing a mother who is barely hanging onto her sanity as she copes with a vortex of emotions that manifest themselves in increasingly hallucinogenic ways that eventually plunge into body-horror, magic-realism territory.
Written for the screen and directed by the gifted Marielle Heller (“Can You Ever Forgive Me?”, “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”) and based on the 2021 novel of the same name by Rachel Yoder, “Nightbitch” is a feature-length meditation on the monumental and conflicting emotions that accompany being a mother, and it makes some incisive points here and there — but when we strip away the often gruesome and in some cases nauseating visuals that accompany the message, it feels like those same points are being made over and over and over.
And over.
Adams sinks her teeth, metaphorically and — yikes — at times literally, into her role as Mother, who was an installation artist of some renown before she surrendered her career and her identity to care for Son (played by twins Arleigh and Emmett Snowden), who is adorable and precocious and NEVER wants to sleep or even wind down, and yes, Mother is at her wit’s end.
Scott McNairy is pure caricature as Husband (hey, I didn’t name these characters, and come to think of it, neither did the filmmakers), whose job keeps him away for most of the week but fancies himself to be quite the modern co-parent, lamenting that he WISHES he could be at home with their son all day, and reminding Mother that happiness is a choice. (The one time that Husband agrees to pitch in by giving Son a bath, he constantly interrupts Mother’s brief respite by asking her for assistance and scrolling through his phone while perched on the toilet.)
“What fresh hell awaits you today?” Mother asks the mirror one morning. How about this: Mother starts experiencing alarming changes, from an increased sense of smell to her teeth becoming sharper to a growth of fur on her lower back to … wait for it … extra nipples. It’s not long before Mother is developing an appetite for small animals as she bolts off into the night on all fours. Is Mother becoming a dog? A Nightbitch, if you will?
Even with a running time of 98 minutes, “Mother” feels like a single metaphor stretched thin. We get flashbacks to Mother’s childhood in a Mennonite community, moments of “Desperate Housewives” humor as Mother feels disconnected from her former co-workers and from other new moms (played by the terrific trio of Mary Holland, Archana Rajan and Zoë Chao, all underused) and an undercooked subplot involving a mysterious librarian/maternal figure (Jessica Harper) who seems to know exactly what Mother is going through, perhaps through a similar experience of her own.
“Nightbitch” positions itself as an edgy, body-horror film with shock-value imagery, and there’s no denying the validity of its premise that even in 2024, the sacrifices of motherhood are taken for granted and underexamined. Still, sitting through this film is akin to conceding an argument to someone who then insists on continuing to pound their points home instead of taking the win.