Nightbitch review: ‘it’s a film for mums’

15A | ★★★✩✩

Moving on from the above review, what are the chances of this film – an adaptation from Rachel Yoder’s hit novel – becoming a musical? High, I’d say. Unlike Prada, however, this work is rooted in the instantly recognisable world in which most of us live.

Stay-at-home parents of either sex will find a kind of catharsis in this tale about the spirit-sapping reality of bringing up children. The sleepless nights; being bullied to tears by a two-year-old’s defiance; the innocent pleasures that a child kidnaps and executes without so much as a ransom note.

Yet this film is for mums. Amy Adams is the mother of a toddler son who finds that the fire she once nurtured as a formidable artist has been extinguished in a pool of wee-wee and need.

The dad (Scoot McNairy) is home at weekends but is otherwise away with a job that involves staying in hotels and writing reports. “I’d kill to stay at home with him everyday,” he has the crass insensitivity to tell his wife.

How he survives her response – a look that could kill a buffalo at five hundred paces – is a mystery. Equally unknowable is the metamorphosis experienced by Adams’s matriarch who in the credits is simply known as “mother”.

This change manifests itself as a canine kind of madness that is also an awakening of a primeval, animalistic self that was first experienced while pregnant (the heightened sense of smell is given as an example) but in our heroine has returned to make her not quite human. Or at least not the kind of human woman – ferocious and carnivorous – that is seen as seemly.

The magical realism of Yoder’s book translates easily to cinema as the mother sprouts a tail and teats. But director Marielle Heller who has also written the screenplay loads the dice in ways that are too convenient to make this a truly challenging work.

The dad, for instance is a well-meaning idiot everyman. And – small point this but I can’t help myself – although much is made of the mother’s solitude (other than the child) the house is an immaculate dust-free zone. Perhaps hoovering is not a very Hollywood kind of realism.

Meanwhile, the logic of a 21st-century woman imprisoned in a “1950s marriage” is undermined by fleeting acknowledgement that the boy could have attended a local day care centre but doesn’t because of the “awful women” there.

Why “awful” is not explained. Better, surely, that the couple couldn’t afford it which would avoid the sense that the crisis is of their own making.

Still, the film is funny, dark and enjoyable if you don’t dwell on the script for too long. And perhaps the musical version will iron out the narrative knots.