Nightbitch’s werewolf body-horror comedy needs more of The Substance

Writer-director Marielle Heller has a gift for making familiar emotions, characters, and situations feel fresh. Whether she’s dealing with a type as well known as the embittered failed writer (Melissa McCarthy in Can You Ever Forgive Me?) or an icon as universal as Mr. Rogers (Tom Hanks in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood), her movies lend them additional dimension and nuance.

That’s true of her new dark-comedy sort-of-a-werewolf-film Nightbitch as well. Here, the lead character is so subsumed into her new-parent identity that she’s never even named: Mother (Amy Adams) is a former artist now working as a stay-at-home mom in the suburbs because Husband (Scoot McNairy) has the more consistent, higher-paying job. 

For a while, it seems like Heller will bring her attentive eye to detail to this well-worn setup, even when Nightbitch appears to be leaning toward obvious tropes. Early on, the film establishes a running motif based around a fairly hoary comic concept: that editing trick where it appears a character has said or done something genuinely provocative, upending social order in response to another person’s dumb question or galling action… until a cut back in time reveals that she was only imagining that cathartic action, and she actually responds meekly or politely, keeping her true feelings bottled inside.

In theory, that’s hacky stuff. But Heller holds the camera on Adams in these moments — in her imagined honesty and her deflated real-world lack of it. And what lingers afterward isn’t necessarily frustration that Mother hasn’t told anyone off. Instead, it’s a pervasive feeling of loneliness. A sitcom-level gag becomes, on Adams’ face, an ineffable feeling of loss. That articulation of disappointment is exactly what many full-time parents feel they must lose in order to get through the day. 

Nightbitch gets plenty of other things right about the messiness of motherhood and the sometimes-conflicting primal instincts that accompany it. For example, Mother’s toddler actually behaves like a real 2-year-old. This may sound like a minor concern, but most movies throw up their hands at the prospect of distinguishing between kids between the ages of 0 and 6. Heller, by contrast, takes care to capture the beautiful, maddening strangeness of a toddler. There’s a small moment when Mother carries her child into a library for storytime, and the kid semi-nonsensically murmurs “They can’t stop us” about the woman at the desk. If this isn’t a real toddler’s ad-lib, it sure sounds like one, and Heller smartly leaves it in the movie. 

The film, based on Rachel Yoder’s 2021 novel of the same name, isn’t purely observational, however. When Mother is left even more on her own by Husband’s business trips (and his general fecklessness), she starts feeling a transformation into a more instinctive, animalistic version of herself. Eating in public, she wolfs down her food with utensils-free abandon, and encourages her young son to do the same, regardless of the gawking they receive. She notices hairs growing in odd places, initially assuming it’s just one more post-pregnancy indignity. At the park, she discovers a newfound kinship with roving, seemingly ownerless dogs. Eventually, she’s running with them at night.

Yes, Nightbitch is a werewolf story — sort of. Whether trying to keep the story grounded or Mother’s transformation ambiguous (does she literally shape-shift, or just tap into primal urges?), Heller treats the story’s body-horror elements gingerly, cautiously. She also has the misfortune to do so just months after moviegoers fell in love with the unapologetic wildness of The Substance. That movie similarly illustrates something many people already understood about the female experience: Women are valued and commodified for their bodies, then heartlessly discarded when they show normal human signs of aging.

The thrills in The Substance come from the zeal writer-director Coralie Fargeat poured into her ideas, physicalizing them into memorable grotesquerie. For all Heller’s scrupulous dedication to the realities of parenthood — Mother’s worn body, the inevitable imbalances, the absolute rage with no easy target — she doesn’t seem interested in going for broke in the same way, particularly around her central conceit. 

Obviously, Heller’s movie has no formal connection to The Substance, was completed before The Substance was released, and aims for a completely different tone. It’s not that Nightbitch cries out to be remodeled as an arch, gory, knowingly broad satire crammed with body horror. But the movie tantalizingly promises weirdness growing from within, then wilts into domestic melodrama. The female dog, with its name claimed as a common slur and its combination of wildness and domestication, has a lot of metaphorical potential. So why does Heller insist on shoving all that to one side to focus on marital problems and possible reconciliations that both emerge too easily?

Nightbitch’s final half hour or so is especially baffling. After concluding that there are no easy solutions to the push-pull between a mother’s parenting instincts and her autonomy, the movie proceeds to make up a bunch of them anyway, with a decisiveness that I fear is supposed to read as empowering. 

That’s especially disappointing given Amy Adams’ fiercely committed, vanity-free performance as Mother. Alternately playing with and against her image as an essentially sunny, optimistic throwback star, she’s the perfect performer to embody the contradictions of motherhood: utterly warm and dedicated to her son, yet pointedly and productively lacking the righteousness of a true believer. She’s too hyper-aware of what she’s lost by focusing on parenthood.

Unfortunately, the movie seems to think that stranding Adams in the movie will cleverly evoke Mother’s loneliness, meaning that McNairy and the rest of the supporting cast (Zoë Chao, Mary Holland, and Ella Thomas as younger fellow moms; the original 1977 Suspiria’s Jessica Harper as a librarian) are given nothing roles. Nightbitch has an ample supply of sharp observations, but it retracts its claws too soon and too easily. It becomes a text on self-help — something The Substance clearly, and thrillingly, portrays as out of reach.

Nightbitch debuts in theaters on Dec. 6.