Missing Persons: The Characters of “Nightbitch” Are Left Blank

It’s a big and bitter surprise to discover that Marielle Heller’s new film, “Nightbitch,” is, for the most part, excruciating to watch. Heller made two of the best movies of recent years, “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” and “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” yet this new one has few of their virtues. Those films are energized by a sense of sincere and fervent curiosity. Heller seemingly can’t get enough of her main characters; she observes and listens to them with the tenacity of an investigative journalist, and creates a visual style to match their wide-ranging discourse. In “Nightbitch,” Heller gives the impression of knowing exactly what she wants to say, with the result that she turns her characters into mouthpieces and films them with little sense of discovery. Coming from such a probing director, the new work is a disappointment, and yet there’s something diagnostically very interesting about the movie’s failings.

“Nightbitch,” based on a novel by Rachel Yoder, centers on a family of three in a comfortable suburb. The family members are unnamed; Amy Adams stars as an artist and former gallery employee who now stays home with her toddler son, whom she calls Baby. Her husband (Scoot McNairy) has a job that requires long hours and frequent travel; he mentions writing reports in a hotel room late at night, but that’s as much as is divulged. (In the novel, he’s an engineer, they live in a “small Midwestern town,” and she used to run a community-based gallery, but the characters are likewise unnamed.) Baby is a poor sleeper, so the mother has to tend to him day and night while also running the household. She seems to have no friends; she grudgingly brings Baby to the local library for a “Book Babies” parent-and-child reading and sing-along session, but she has only contempt for the other suburban mommies, whom she considers unintellectual, unstylish, uninspired, unamusing.

Isolated and exhausted, the mother is frustrated, and miserable. In social situations, she feels pressure to wax lyrical about the joys of motherhood, even as she fantasizes about speaking her mind or lashing out physically. But the mother doesn’t snap; instead, at night, she turns into a dog. She finds herself growing sharp incisors, unexpected fur, a tail, and six extra nipples, and developing a heightened sense of smell, cravings for meat, an urge to hunt small animals, and an irresistible attractiveness to the neighborhood’s stray dogs. (She also refers to herself as Nightbitch, as in the novel.) At first, Nightbitch assumes she’s dreaming, but then she awakens to discover that she has killed a rabbit—and then the family’s cat.

The first hint of an aesthetic problem with “Nightbitch” is when Adams’s character calls her toddler “Baby.” Soon it became obvious that the main characters’ namelessness is not just a question of omission—plenty of secondary and incidental characters are named—but a part of a deliberate choice to de-characterize. For instance, there’s no indication of the couple’s interests. They don’t talk except about basic practicalities; he plays a video game (which one?); the couple sit and watch something on TV (what?); when she’s home with Baby, there’s no radio on, no podcast, no music playing, nothing that suggests any trace of identity. She is reduced to her function as a mother and, occasionally, as a wife.

That’s the point, of course: stripped by her unending domestic duties of everything that makes her who she is, Nightbitch undergoes a feral transformation as her suppressed rage erupts. But that’s an elevator pitch, not an experience. The film’s premise is rendered abstract, mapped out with a quasi-mathematical rigor that merely elides the specifics on which the drama depends. It’s as if the story were plotted on a graph, with one axis labelled “money” and another one labelled “communication.”

Early on, Nightbitch tries to tell her husband about her frustrations and her desire to change things around by getting a part-time job. He shuts her down with the declaration that “you know, the math doesn’t totally add up”—that she’d earn less than child care would cost. But what are those numbers? And what are the other relevant numbers? How much does he make? How expensive is their comfortably big house? How much do they owe, and what are their savings? Presumably, if he were earning enough to pay for day care or a babysitter, “Nightbitch” would be a very short movie. Lack of money is an underlying stress that the film leaves unexpressed and unexplored. It’s telling, therefore, that there isn’t any other purchase or payment in the movie that appears to cause a shadow of a doubt or a second thought. Even when—spoiler alert—a change in the couple’s circumstances entails a sharp increase in expenses, it’s neither discussed nor sweated over. It’s no problem at all.

The movie’s silences about money are matched by wider-ranging silences, which concern the other axis—communication—on which the story is graphed. Nightbitch repeatedly makes clear that the decision to leave her gallery job and her artistic calling and to stay home with Baby was her own—that she was eager to do it. What’s unclear is the couple’s decision to leave the city and move to the suburbs, what they anticipated the financial consequences to be, what their other options were, what experiences and desires prompted Nightbitch to make this choice. She also accuses her husband of having accepted her choice too rapidly, when pushing back would have affirmed the importance of her career and her art. What are their politics? What made them think that they’d find happiness in the suburbs?

Nightbitch, it’s understood, grew up outside the city, and her mother—an accomplished singer who gave up her own career to raise children— also underwent something like the nocturnal transformations that Nightbitch now experiences. Has she ever discussed this with her husband? Why does she have no friends to talk with, no one to take into her confidence? She does have her grad-school art-world friends, whom she sees again after a long absence and who, she discovers, are assholes in whom she couldn’t confide at all. Not only do Nightbitch and her husband not talk much now; they seemingly didn’t talk much before Baby came along. They give the impression of having met for the first time on the set when Heller first called “Action.” There’s no loam of shared experience, no sense of a shared life, nothing between them but the silences on which the story depends, and without which, again, the drama would quickly be resolved. There isn’t even much in the way of canine experience—a director who imagined these characters in subjective detail would also have made much more of Nightbitch’s feral adventures. In this regard, as in many others, Heller’s adaptation has bowdlerized Yoder’s novel. (For example, if the movie had dramatized the book’s dénouement, it would likely have rivalled “The Substance” for gonzo spectacle.)

The silences of “Nightbitch” regarding money and the blanks regarding inner lives and shared lives make the movie an empty and contrived experience. This a surprise, not only because Heller’s two previous works were so alert and engaged but because the topic of the new one turns out to be one in which she feels a personal stake. I learned about this only by reading my colleague Emily Nussbaum’s recent Profile of Heller, in which Heller speaks about her experience staying home with her young children, while her partner, the filmmaker Jorma Taccone, went on working. At the core of the film’s artistic failings is a paradox—of a deep personal investment and a frozen artistic involvement. The inherent conflict of Nightbitch’s misery and her husband’s practical-minded indifference is a poignant and fruitful subject for a movie, a classic premise for a melancholy melodrama. But the sweetening of the story and the effacing of its details suggest unease and ambivalence about its personal aspects.

Directors of great marital melodramas either haven’t had such worries or else have been more at ease with the autobiographical aspects of their art. Nothing suggests that Douglas Sirk was reporting on his home life in “There’s Always Tomorrow”; everyone understood that Ingmar Bergman, directing his partner Liv Ullmann, was doing something of the sort in “Scenes from a Marriage.” As for Ida Lupino, she directed an extraordinary marital melodramas, “The Bigamist,” from 1953, in which she and Joan Fontaine co-starred as a man’s two wives—soon after, Lupino had divorced Collier Young, the movie’s screenwriter and co-producer, and Fontaine had married him. The marital melodrama, it seems, can flourish with philosophical distance or, conversely, with uninhibited openness or sheer chutzpah—in any case, not with the hedging defensiveness on display in “Nightbitch.” ♦