Yahoo Movies Amy Adams hails Nightbitch's 'unfiltered and feral' take on motherhood
The film had its UK premiere at the BFI London Film Festival
Amy Adams goes all out in her new film Nightbitch, which examines the harsh reality of motherhood in a fun and unexpected way, in a story the star described as "feral" at its UK premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on Wednesday, 16 October.
Nightbitch centres on Adams' character Mother who begins to have an identity crisis after giving up her job to be a stay-at-home mum to her four-year-old son. Motherhood is not all she expected it to be and, while she loves being with her son, a quiet rage begins to simmer inside of her, which takes a fantastical turn when it makes her transform into a dog at night.
Ahead of the film screening, Adams shared why the film's honest and raw exploration of motherhood felt so important to explore right now: "It gave me an opportunity to not only tell my relationship with motherhood, but my sisters, my friends, Marielle [Heller, the film's director]. We'd all had these conversations, there was a deep universality to the experience of motherhood.
"But also the exploration of relationships inside of motherhood, the relationship with the husband, everything just felt so true and in that so relatable, so funny. There just was so much to explore, and it did it in a way that was unflinching, unfiltered, and, frankly, feral.
"I can't stop with the puns, I'm sorry, but it just was such a great opportunity to come from a really deep, emotional, true place."
The film received impressive reviews from critics with Adams' unfettered performance drawing a huge amount of praise.
The Telegraph's Robbie Collin highlighted Adams for her portrayal of Mother, writing that she delivers "a performance that eschews grand crack-up gestures for lower-key, lived-in forms of mental and emotional dishevelment that should elicit howls of recognition from mothers (and others) in the audience."
He added: "In place of showpiece scream-the-set-down moments, Heller uses soliloquies to pry holes into her lead character’s psyche: there’s a stunner in a trendy restaurant during which Adams realises motherhood has driven a wedge between her and her child-free (or heavily nanny-assisted) art-world chums.
"Adams is already a six-time Oscar nominee: it’s very possible that for this, she could finally nab one outright. From out of its sitcom-neat package, Nightbitch unleashes something primeval and wild – thought it might seem cuddly, hot spit flecks its jaws."
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Variety's Peter Debruge wrote that Adams gives a "ferocious" performance in Nightbitch, adding: "Sinking her teeth into Mother the way Mother herself might a bloody steak, Adams courageously embodies Mother’s exasperation, finding the comedy in every setback.
"In Adams’ hands, Mother turns her identity crisis — the way the woman she was before “died in childbirth,” leaving someone even she doesn’t recognise in her place — into a tour-de-force act of reinvention."
Maureen Lee Lenker of Entertainment Weekly wrote that "it takes a writer-director of Heller's insightfulness and an actress as skilled as Adams to make it the wildly entertaining and profoundly honest film that it is."
Lenker added that Nightbitch is Adams' "most fearless work yet" as she continues to put everything on the line to convey Mother's internal, and external, struggle.
One critic who was not impressed by the film was Evening Standard's Nick Curtis who wrote that the film was "completely barking" and a "meandering" film. The critic wrote: "It feels like an authentic howl from the heart, and Adams gives an admirably un-vain performance, but it’s about as subtle as a Doberman bite."
Curtis added that the films "observations are not particularly new, and Heller simply illustrates them over and over again" which is why he found it frustrating, adding that he felt "there’s no real sense of the person Mother was before motherhood" even if "Adams is intensely watchable throughout".
Nightbitch premieres in UK on Friday, 6 December.
