Missing Persons: The characters in “Nightbitch” are left blank

It’s a big, bitter surprise to discover that Marielle Heller’s new film, “Nightbitch,” is mostly unbearable to watch. Heller made two of the best films of recent years, “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” and “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” but this new one has few of their virtues. These films are energized by a sense of genuine and heartfelt curiosity. Heller can’t seem to get enough of his protagonists; she observes and listens to them with the tenacity of an investigative journalist, creating 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 is something diagnostically very interesting about the film’s flaws.

“Nightbitch,” based on a novel by Rachel Yodercenters on a family of three in a pleasant suburb. The family members are unnamed; Amy Adams stars as an artist and former gallery employee who now stays at home with her young 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 much is revealed. (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 similarly unnamed.) Baby is a poor sleeper, so the mother has to tend to him day and night , while he also runs the household. She doesn’t seem to have any friends; she reluctantly brings Baby to the local library for a “Book Babies” parent-child read-and-sing-along session, but she has nothing but contempt for the other suburban moms, whom she considers unintellectual, unstylish, uninspired, unentertaining .

Isolated and exhausted, the mother is frustrated and miserable. In social situations, she feels pressured to wax lyrical about the joys of motherhood, even as she fantasizes about speaking her mind or lashing out physically. But the mother does not snap; instead, she turns into a dog at night. She finds herself growing sharp front teeth, unexpected fur, a tail, and six extra nipples, and develops a heightened sense of smell, a craving for meat, an urge to hunt small animals, and an irresistible attraction 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 wakes up to find she’s killed a rabbit—and then the family cat.

The first hint of an aesthetic problem with “Nightbitch” is when Adams’ character calls her toddler “Baby.” It soon became clear that the namelessness of the main characters is not just a matter of omission – there are plenty of secondary and incidental characters named – but part of a conscious choice to decharacterize. For example, there is no indication of the couple’s interests. They only talk about basic practical things; he is playing a video game (which?); the couple sits and watches something on TV (what?); when she’s home with Baby, there’s no radio on, no podcast, no music playing, nothing to suggest any trace of identity. She is reduced to her function as a mother and occasionally as a wife.

That’s the point, of course: cut off from her never-ending domestic duties for everything that makes her who she is, Nightbitch undergoes a wild transformation as her repressed rage erupts. But it’s an elevator pitch, not an experience. The film’s premise is made abstract, mapped out with a quasi-mathematical rigor that simply removes the details on which the drama depends. It is as if history were plotted on a graph, with one axis labeled “money” and another labeled “communication.”

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

The film’s silence about money is matched by wider silences which relate to the other axis – communication – on which the story is drawn. Nightbitch repeatedly makes it clear that the decision to leave her gallery job and her artistic calling and stay home with Baby was her own—that she was eager to do so. What is unclear is the couple’s decision to leave the city and move to the suburbs, what they expected the financial consequences to be, what their other options were, what experiences and desires led Nightbitch to make this choice. She also accuses her husband of having accepted her choice too quickly, as it would have confirmed the importance of her career and her art. What is their policy? What made them think they would find happiness in the suburbs?

Nightbitch, it is understood, grew up outside the city, and her mother – an accomplished singer who gave up her own career to raise children – also went through something similar to the nocturnal transformations that Nightbitch now experiences. Has she ever discussed this with her husband? Why does she have no friends to talk to, no one to confide in? She has her friends in the art world from high school, whom she sees again after a long absence, and who she discovers are assholes she couldn’t confide in at all. Not only do Nightbitch and her husband not talk much now; they apparently didn’t talk much until Baby came. They give the impression of having met for the first time on the set when Heller first called “Action”. There is no clay 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 resolve. There’s not even much in the way of canine experience—a director who envisioned these characters in subjective detail would have made much more out of Nightbitch’s wild adventures, too. In this respect, as in many others, Heller’s adaptation has done Yoder’s novel a great deal. (For example, if the movie had dramatized the book’s ending, it probably would have rivaled “The Substance” for gonzo acting.)

“Nightbitch’s” silence about money and the blank spaces regarding inner life and communal life make the film an empty and contrived experience. This is a surprise, not only because Heller’s two previous works were so attentive and engaged, but because the subject of the new one turns out to be one in which she feels a personal stake. I only learned about this by reading my colleague Emily Nussbaum’s recent Profile of Heller, in which Heller recounts her experience of staying home with her young children while her partner, filmmaker Jorma Taccone, continued to work. At the heart of the film’s artistic failure is a paradox – of a deep personal investment and a frozen artistic commitment. The inherent conflict between Nightbitch’s misery and her husband’s practical indifference is a poignant and fertile subject for a film, a classic premise for a melancholic melodrama. But the sweetness of the story and the obliteration of its details suggest unease and ambivalence about its personal aspects.

Directors of great marital melodramas have either had no such concerns or have been more comfortable with the autobiographical aspects of their art. There is no indication that Douglas Sirk reported on his home life in “There’s Always Tomorrow”; everyone understood that Ingmar Bergman, who directed his partner Liv Ullmann, did something like that in “Scenes from a Marriage”. As for Ida Lupino, she directed an extraordinary marital melodrama, “The Bigamist,” from 1953, in which she and Joan Fontaine starred as one man’s two wives—soon after, Lupino had divorced Collier Young, the film’s screenwriter and co-producer, and Fontaine had married him. The marital melodrama, it seems, can flourish with philosophical distance or, conversely, with unbridled openness or sheer chutzpah—at least not with the hedging defensiveness on display in “Nightbitch.”