Amy Adams talks working with small children in ‘Nightbitch’
Amy Adams tells USA TODAY’s Brian Truitt that working with small children in “Nightbitch” made her miss those younger years with her daughter.
Spoiler alert! The following story contains major details about the plot and ending of “Nightbitch” (now in theaters).
Every dog has her day.
In the feral dark comedy “Nightbitch,” Amy Adams plays a worn-out mom who thinks she may be morphing into a red-haired Husky. The feminist fairy tale examines the impossible expectations of motherhood, as our protagonist ― simply known as Mother ― channels her rage and reclaims her power by unleashing her animal instincts.
The movie is based on Rachel Yoder’s 2021 novel and was adapted by director Marielle Heller (“Can You Ever Forgive Me?”). The biggest departures from the book in the new film:
The ‘Nightbitch’ movie makes Mother’s husband more sympathetic
The film fleshes out many of the characters, while also adding a few new ones. It features several flashbacks centered on Mother’s religious upbringing and her unhappy mom (Kerry O’Malley), who apparently had canine inclinations as well. Mother spends more time bonding with her fellow parents, as well as Norma (Jessica Harper), the town’s sage librarian, who gives her a mysterious book called “The Field Guide to Mystical Women.” In Hoder’s novel, Mother obsessively tries to track down “Field Guide” author Wanda White, although that’s been nixed for the movie.
The most significant change involves Mother’s husband (Scoot McNairy). He’s extremely passive and aloof for most of Hoder’s book, until Mother starts sleeping in a different bedroom and demands more alone time to work on her art. She transforms into a dog each night and prowls around the neighborhood, and he dutifully showers her off when she returns home every morning.
But the relationship is less one-sided in the movie. Mother blames her husband for making her give up her career for a life of stay-at-home servitude. But in a heated confrontation, he counters that she, too, has little interest in her husband’s day-to-day, and has long resented him without ever trying to talk about what’s bothering her. The couple agrees to separate and split time taking care of their son, which gives her more opportunity to paint.
That harrowing cat scene is much less gruesome in the Amy Adams film
Perhaps the book’s most memorable scene is when Mother’s son walks into the kitchen and finds his mom’s face covered in blood, hovering over their dead cat. Although Mother still resents the feline in the movie, the sequence is far less brutal: One evening, Nightbitch walks into her front yard, where neighborhood dogs have assembled a buffet of dead rodents and skunks. She decides to offer up the kitty to the sacrificial pile, lunging toward the cat just before the screen cuts to Mother, who’s back in human form and lying in bed.
Heller felt the image of Adams gutting the feline would be too “gnarly” and “visceral” for most moviegoers to stomach.
“There is something very different about actually physically seeing something than imagining it in your head,” Heller tells USA TODAY. “I talked to Rachel Yoder about it and I said, ‘I think we need to kill the cat from her dog form.’ And her response was, ‘You’re totally right; that is the right call. I don’t think anybody could handle physically seeing that.’”
The movie ending is totally different from the ‘Nightbitch’ book
The book ends on a much stranger note than the movie. Newly invigorated to create, Mother decides to stage a performance art show at a local theater, where she appears in dog form with a mound of bones. Nightbitch chases audience members through a sort of hallucinated forest before killing a rabbit onstage and serving it up to her young son. The trippy theater piece becomes a divisive media sensation, as audiences find it both repulsive and beautiful.
The film is a lot less magical: Mother hosts a rather chaste art show at a local gallery featuring paintings and sculptures of women and dogs. She reconciles with her husband at the end of the night and the family finds a balance with her bestial tendencies, in a wide shot of them playing in a bedroom that reveals itself to be a forest. In the final moments, Mother gives birth to a baby girl in her living room, letting out a primal scream before the credits roll.
As much as we love both Adams and Heller, fans of Yoder’s book may be disappointed that “Nightbitch” has been defanged for the big screen. The novel’s biting satire and mucky spirit have mostly been jettisoned for Facebook-ready female empowerment slogans. But Heller says she didn’t set out to make a “one-to-one translation” given the stream-of-consciousness nature of Yoder’s writing.
“The goal became to digest her book, get to know it as deeply as I could, let it intermingle with my own life and then create out of that process,” Heller says. “It’s much more of a morphing into something new.”
That’s what’s great about Heller’s adaptation, Adams adds. “There is so much that each person can identify with, no matter whether they have children, whether they’re fathers, whether they’re mothers. There’s something in this story that feels so identifiable and universal.”
Contributing: Brian Truitt
