Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.So then: Nightbitch. Quite the title, isn’t it? The name evokes cult mayhem, and in no way a wry comic portrait of new motherhood starring the chipper Amy Adams. (The cherry on top? Backed by boutique subsidiary Searchlight, this is actually a Disney movie.) In practice, that blunt middle finger translates to a light spatter of horror. Teeth sharpen; things end badly for local wildlife. But the real terror lurks elsewhere. We have a parent-and-toddler singalong to get to.Now, I am not a mother — a caveat that feels like it should be said out loud. Still, the film’s sense of hard-earned truths is unmistakable. The source material is Rachel Yoder’s 2021 novel. In line with the book, Adams’ character goes tellingly unnamed while staying at home with her two-year-old son.Early scenes are played for fraying laughs. Days blur making pasta gloop on what Disney would call no fudging sleep. Out grocery shopping, a bump into a childless acquaintance triggers an epic speech, a distress flare of lost identity and brain fade. Then director Marielle Heller cuts to reveal it was all just an interior monologue. “Yeah, I love being a mom,” Adams smiles, back in reality.The timing of Nightbitch is notable. The online rise of the hyper-domestic “tradwife” means it now feels surprisingly open-to-debate to say a woman might not be wholly fulfilled playing horsey before making her husband dinner. Here Adams’ partner is also anonymous, played by Scoot McNairy and prone to telling his exhausted wife that “happiness is a choice.” Once, she was a successful artist. Now there is self-doubt and chin hair.Enter Nightbitch: a raging inner self that takes literal canine form. First comes a heightened sense of smell, then a tail. A full metamorphosis leads to animal abandon.“Is it friendly?” her son asks of a new dog friend. The question hangs over the movie too. In the face of some eye-catching physical changes, you might be reminded of The Substance, this year’s lurid body horror in which Demi Moore showcased the plight of older women in Hollywood. And Nightbitch almost plays nasty too. Adams’ raw meat diet is not entirely store bought.But for a movie this pointedly primal, Nightbitch is also weirdly defanged. Heller is a talented director. Her last film, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, was a brilliant unpeeling of US TV institution Fred Rogers. In Nightbitch, though, all the daring seems to go into the premise, then sputter out. If you’re asking whether Adams’ double life is to be read as an actual transformation or sleep-starved fantasy, prepare to keep asking. On screen, the fuzzy edge feels evasive. And frankly, her feral rampages are tame.I know. How very like a critic to fault a movie for being the one it is, not the one they want it to be. But the PG politeness also speaks to a worldview. Insights abound about the lonely grind of motherhood — but only within a vision of the role where a couple can, for instance, choose to live on one partner’s salary with no dip in their standard of living, while caring for a child in perfect health. And mothers to whom such things might not apply? Well, they are all off-screen, still waiting for the film that lets them howl too.★★★☆☆In UK and US cinemas from December 6
