Amy Adams’ satire of motherhood is a motherfucker

night bitch, In her adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s best-selling novel, director Marielle Heller shows you her preferred hand right from the start – or perhaps an already hairy paw. A mother, played by Amy Adams, is grocery shopping with her two-year-old son. She runs into the woman who replaced her at her old gallery job now that she’s decided to be a stay-at-home mom. Her friend says it must be wonderful to spend so much focused time with their toddler. As a mother – by the way, she is only mentioned in the entire film with her parental status; Your identity wasn’t stolen, but rather co-opted – opens your mouth to answer that yes, Naturally It’s amazing what emerges instead is a monologue full of disappointment, insecurity, confusion, disbelief at how her body has changed, anger at the social inequalities surrounding parenthood and relationships, and the sneaking suspicion that she is in a stifling prison trapped by its own construction.

Then, after Adams delivers this tirade with motherly tone and anger, conveying that the children may be fine but the matriarchs of the world are anything but, Heller rewinds and recreates the moment. The woman from her old gallery job says again that it must be wonderful to spend so much concentrated time with her toddler. Mom smiles and says, “Yes, I do. I love it. I love being a mother.” Because what else can she say? What else is she allowed to say without feeling like a “bad mommy”?

Make no mistake: Night slut I do not want to draw your attention to the fact that it is difficult to give birth to a child and then take on the bulk of the responsibility of raising a child. This is a given. What it wants to convey is that modern motherhood is definitely a motherfucker, and that the strange notion that such a “dirty little secret” can only be discussed in the context of mommy groups and wine-soaked afternoons, or just furtively shouted into a pillow , should be extinct. Yoder’s book plunged headfirst into the reality of many women who found the gap between the expectations of parenthood and the experience itself wide, before taking a fascinatingly magical and brutal detour into primal scream fantasy. And while Heller’s film occasionally deviates from the full-on howl-at-the-moon intensity of the source material, it still manages to come away with more than a little blood on its teeth.

You could say that Heller specializes in providing forums for “difficult” (read: complicated) women, having made her extraordinary debut with the 2015 Frank adaptation The Diary of a Teenage Girl, gave Melissa McCarthy an excellent anti-hero role in 2018 Can you ever forgive me? and captured Heidi Schreck’s Broadway hit What the Constitution means to me for posterity in 2020. (We would include her justly praised performance as the mother of a chess champion The Queen’s Gambit (Even in this game.) It’s hard to imagine another contemporary American filmmaker better suited to creating a sympathetic yet devastating stage on which Adams’ nameless protagonist could rage without bringing her to the sum of her Reduce growling and whining. However, life as a stay-at-home mom is immediately described as an endless montage of cooking, cleaning, reading stories, and swinging – higher, higher, higher! – and acted as her child’s Insta playdate. Her son (played by brown-haired twins Arleigh and Emmett Snowden) might actually be adorable. The mind-numbing repetition of rinse and repeat is still tedious.

Life outside of the routine isn’t much better considering the mother without a nickname doesn’t feel like socializing with the other beleaguered mothers at pre-nap sing-alongs at the local library. The more an eager trio of fellow mothers (Zoe Chao, Archana Rajan and Mary Holland) try to befriend her, the more alienated she feels. Her husband (Scoot McNairy) travels a lot on business and seems a little confused about the basic responsibilities of raising children and how much support his wife really needs. And what’s going on with those strange tufts of hair that seem to sprout from her back, or what looks like a stub of a tail where her spine ends?

(A quick word about McNairy’s character, who has drawn much criticism since Heller’s film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. Some people have expressed that this gentleman is less a flawed spouse and more a straw man, who simply forces his way into scenes and/or he appears shocked that his presence alone won’t get him a pass, just so that Adams’ exhausted mother, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, can appear justified in her frustration of being clueless to a real idiot – you want to shake him off when his self-centeredness boils over during an argument – and it’s notable that McNairy humanizes him without sanding off the rough edges. The distracted, uncomfortable father is nowhere near so much of a caricature, as people may think. And some of those more vocal critics with XY chromosomes may want to take a long, hard look in the mirror. The truth can be hard sometimes, brother.

It’s after a pack of dogs surround Ma and her son in the park, but before Adams starts digging around on all fours in their front yard Night slut sets the stage for something a little more conceptual than just the diary of a crazy house mother. The question is not how or why this character transforms into a furry, rodent-killing dog at night, which Heller shows through a few suggestive body horror shots and quick cuts, but what the aftermath of the transformation is. The answer is liberation, which Adams gives you through a performance that seems as divisive as the film itself. There’s a complete lack of self-awareness when Mother devours handfuls of meatloaf or playfully insults strangers in public, and that’s fitting Adams does to bring this woman to life. She’s not afraid to be unlikable, messy and gross, not to mention risk losing the audience at certain key points. But Adams isn’t shy about looking downright silly, and you can’t blame her for not fully embracing the idea of ​​this woman finding self-confidence by engaging in after-hours escapades at the Doggy style loses.

Once that loss becomes her gain – as a woman, as an individual, as a mother, and finally once again as an artist – and the film narrows its focus to this idea of ​​postpartum rebirth, the film slides on in the combination of discomfort and shit – Feelings of dizziness for a long time. There’s a feeling that it could have gone further and pushed even more boundaries, especially before tying everything back together with a “happy” ending that feels mostly, but not entirely, earned. But there’s still a bark and a bite here in the way that allows a certain brand of all-too-often repressed female anger to truly blossom. For those of us used to seeing and hearing the “dirty little secret” of motherhood that is not a fairy tale, if not firsthand then certainly through vicariousness and proximity, is the idea of ​​a film that has conversations stimulates and only partially leads there, intoxicating. For those who know the feelings that Heller & Co. have. get along all too well – Night slut has your back. Representation is important.