Nightbitch needed more of The Substance in his werewolf body horror

Author and director Marielle Heller has the gift of making familiar emotions, characters and situations seem fresh. Whether she’s dealing with a guy as well-known as the bitter, 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) their films give them additional dimension and nuance.

This also applies to their new dark werewolf film Night slut as well as. Here, the main character is so wrapped up in the identity of her new parents that she isn’t even mentioned by name: Mother (Amy Adams) is a former artist who now works as a suburban housewife because her husband (Scoot McNairy) has that a more stable and better paying job.

For a while, it seems like Heller is bringing her keen eye for detail to this well-worn setup, even though Night slut seems to lean towards obvious tropes. Early on, the film establishes a running motif based on a fairly well-worn comic concept: that editing trick where it looks like a character has said or done something really provocative, disrupting the social order in response to the stupid question or annoying one turns another person’s action on its head…until a cut Back in Time reveals that she only imagined this cathartic action, and in fact she responds meekly or politely, keeping her true feelings hidden inside.

In theory, this is hacky stuff. But Heller keeps the camera on Adams in these moments—on her imagined honesty and her deflated lack of honesty in the real world. And what remains afterwards isn’t necessarily the frustration that mother didn’t insult anyone. Instead, it’s a pervasive feeling of loneliness. A sitcom-level gag becomes an indescribable sense of loss on Adams’ face. This articulation of disappointment is exactly what many full-time parents need to lose in order to get through the day.

Night slut got a lot of other things right about the messiness of motherhood and the sometimes conflicting primal instincts that come with it. For example, the mother’s toddler actually behaves like a real two-year-old. This may sound like a minor issue, but most films throw up their hands at the idea of ​​distinguishing between children ages 0 to 6. In contrast, Heller makes a point of capturing the beautiful, crazy strangeness of a toddler. There is a brief moment when mother carries her child into a library to read to him and the child mutters, half nonsensically, about the woman at the desk: “You can’t stop us.” While it’s not a true toddler adlib, it certainly sounds like one, and Heller cleverly leaves it in the film.

However, the film, based on Rachel Yoder’s 2021 novel of the same name, is not a purely observational film. As Mother becomes even more on her own due to her husband’s business trips (and his general recklessness), she begins to feel a transformation into a more instinctive, animalistic version of herself. She eats in public, devouring her food with abandon and without utensils, and encourages her young son to do the same, regardless of the stares he receives. She notices hair growing in strange places and initially assumes it’s just another post-pregnancy humiliation. In the park she discovers a newfound kinship with roaming, seemingly homeless dogs. After all, she runs with them at night.

Yes, Night slut is a werewolf story – so to speak. Whether he’s trying to keep the story grounded or whether the mother’s transformation is ambiguous (is she literally transforming or just tapping into primal instincts?), Heller treads lightly with the story’s body horror elements and carefully around. She also has the misfortune of doing so just months after moviegoers fell in love with the uncompromising wildness of The substance. This film similarly illustrates something that many people have already understood about the women’s experience: women are valued and commodified for their bodies and then heartlessly discarded when they show normal human signs of aging.

The thrill in The substance come from the zeal that writer and director Coralie Fargeat poured into her ideas and embodied them into a memorable grotesque. For all of Heller’s conscientious devotion to the realities of parenting – mother’s worn-out body, the inevitable imbalances, the absolute rage that has no easy target – she doesn’t seem interested in making money in the same way, especially not when it comes to their central conceit.

Obviously, Heller’s film has no formal connection to The substancehas already been completed The substance was released and aims for a completely different tone. That’s not it Night slut is begging to be remade into an arch, bloody, knowingly broad satire full of body horror. But the film tantalizingly promises that the craziness will grow from within and then descend into domestic melodrama. The dog, whose name is often used as a swear word and combines wildness and domestication, has a lot of metaphorical potential. So why does Heller insist on pushing all that aside to focus on marital problems and possible reconciliations, both of which come up too easily?

Night slutThe last half hour or so is particularly startling. Having concluded that there are no easy solutions to the tension between a mother’s parenting instincts and her autonomy, the film nevertheless presents a number of them, and does so with a determination that I think is meant to be empowering.

This is particularly disappointing when you consider that Amy Adams plays the mother with such commitment and no vanity. Alternately playing with and against her image as an essentially sunny, optimistic retro star, she is the perfect performer to embody the contradictions of motherhood: utterly warm and devoted to her son, yet articulate and productive without the righteousness of a true believer. She is all too aware of what she loses by focusing on parenting.

Unfortunately, the film seems to think that stranding Adams in the film 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 mothers; the 1977 original) Suspiria(Jessica Harper as Librarian) receive no roles. Night slut has plenty of keen observations, but retracts its claws too soon and too easily. It will be a text about self-help – something The substance presented clearly and excitingly, as unattainable.

Night slut hits theaters on December 6th.