At The 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, 'Nightbitch' quickly garnered predominantly positive reviews, currently holding at 72% on Rotten Tomatoes. In the film, which is distributed by Searchlight Pictures with a release date on December 6, 2024, "A woman (Amy Adams) pauses her career to be a stay-at-home mom seeking a new chapter in her life and encounters just that, when her maternal routine takes a surreal turn." The ensemble cast includes Scoot McNairy, Zoe Chao, and Ella Thomas. But what did the critics say?
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| Photo by Josh Chiodo on Unsplash |
David Rooney of Hollywood Reporter says, "It’s disappointing that a book greeted as a feminist fairy tale, which dared to say out loud some dark truths about the more often unspoken conflicts of motherhood, has been defanged." Adding, "While McNairy makes Husband annoyingly inattentive, the actor is also careful not to let him become a complete douche. There’s humor in his admission that solo Baby duty — which allows Mother to throw herself back into her art — is hard. But it feels like a betrayal of the story’s whole reason for being that his redemption takes up so much space. Nightbitch is a film that should make us squirm, but its path to marital harmony seems designed to soothe, not challenge. “Motherhood is fucking brutal,” says the protagonist. But then suddenly, it’s not, a tidy resolution driven home in a WTF? scene right before the end credits roll."
Johnny Oleksinski of New York Post writes, "Mother, an artist who used to be shown at major galleries and museums, must pretend to everyone who asks that she couldn’t be happier with her sedate life. Her faux contentment just conceals a primal urge to charge through the woods and, you know, kill squirrels. Because Adams is so good at playing people who are just about to snap (“Julie & Julia,” “Doubt,” “Hillbilly Elegy”), the viewer goes along with her for the ride, er, walk. “Nightbitch” is funny and lovably weird. A bigger issue than its oddball plot is that the film, which Heller also wrote for the screen, is one-note. Once we know where the story is headed, it ventures there exactly as we anticipate it to — and nowhere else. Much like a dog fetching a stick.
Meagan Navarro of Bloody Disgusting notes, "Adams creates a grounding emotional throughline to tie it together just enough for its messaging to succeed, eliciting some genuine laughs along the way, but Nightbitch seems too scared of its own feral setup and defangs its righteous wrath too early."
Peter Gray of The AU Review praises the film, stating, "Despite the fact that the recently released trailer made Nightbitch look more like a quirky comedy – think a female-drive, R-rated take on Tim Allen’s The Shaggy Dog – I can attest that Marielle Heller‘s take on Rachel Yoder‘s seemingly unadaptable 2021 novel of the same name is far from the laughable ridiculousness some may expect. It’s quirky, yes, and a film about a woman turning into a dog has a layer of ridiculousness built in, but this is truly a meditation on motherhood, isolation and female rage, driven at the helm by a fearless Amy Adams. And despite its horrific elements, Nightbitch is also far from the disturbing genre experience that some other critics out of TIFF (where this film had its world premiere) were waxing lyrical about. After something like The Substance, almost anything will pale in comparison, and though there may be a few light squeamish moments – Adams’ unnamed character (she’s simply credited as “Mother”) sprouts a tail out of an enlarged cyst on her body at one point, whilst another shot of menstrual blood evoked an audible reaction – it’s nothing a genre fan can’t handle. The true horrors of Nightbitch lay within the pressure of parenthood, and what that can do to someone’s psyche as a result of not feeling supported."
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