It's Been a Big Year for Feminist Body Horror
Nightbitch and The Substance both tackle female aging with gross-out horror-movie metaphors.
It's been a banner year for feminist body horror, even if that only means there were two movies to fall into that niche. First, there was The Substance, an audacious, angry, stylish, and pointedly disgusting satire of on-screen aging, in which TV star Demi Moore uses a mysterious injection to transform herself into Margaret Qualley. This week, we got Nightbitch, a slight, strange parable about the loneliness and anxiety of modern motherhood, as told through a new mom who is slowly transforming into a dog.
It's hard to watch Nightbitch without thinking of The Substance, which was a bolder, riskier, more thoroughly realized production. Both films revolve around extensive body transformations that are meant as hit-you-over-the-head metaphors for aging. In The Substance, Moore's aging starlet first transforms into Qualley, who is younger, more screen-ready version of herself—but Qualley disobeys the rules that govern the transformation, keeping herself young for longer than the product allows, leading to both of them turning into horrific monsters. Directed by Coralie Fargeat, the film is set in a disorienting, not-quite-real version of Hollywood, and it's shot like a David Lynch fever dream, with an added cartoonish sensibility that recalls early Terry Gilliam.
In the end, it takes its body horror metaphor about as far as it can do. That might be too far for some: The movie climaxes a scene in which a freakishly deformed creature wearing a paper Demi Moore mask spews blood over a crowd of entertainment industry luminaries, but there's no questioning the film's commitment, its vision, or its stylistic uniformity.
Nightbitch is built on a similar metaphorical conceit, but it's far more reserved. When the film begins, we meet Mother (Amy Adams), who is pushing her toddler-aged boy around a grocery store in a cart. They run into one of Mother's former coworkers, who asks how she's doing, and Mother replies with a long monologue about the loneliness and isolation of motherhood, the seeming loss of a sense of self, the ways that society doesn't value motherhood, and so on—and it turns out to be a fantasy, the sort of thing she wants to say, but doesn't.
The movie, of course, is meant to convey exactly what she says, which is part of why it's so underwhelming.
Where The Substance powered through on satirical menace and gross-out audacity, Nightbitch mostly just wants to tell you, quite directly, what it's about.
Mother feels trapped by parenting. She is left alone for days on end while her husband—er, Husband (Scoot McNairy)—travels for work. He says he'd love to stay home, but when he does, he struggles to manage the most basic parenting tasks, and he doesn't know how to support her artistic ambitions. But he never says anything more than that, never gives a hint of a personality of a spark of connection to his wife. He's a one-note character, barely worthy of his generic non-name, and the conflict between Mother and Husband, like so much of the film, is flat and featureless—a tidy recounting of Mother's woes rather than an exploration of a complex marital-parental psychodynamic. These aren't characters so much as avatars of simple ideas, and their generic arguments play like bullet-pointed AI summaries of conflicts middle class couples might have.
Nightbitch is a film with ideas about modern motherhood, but very little drama, and that extends to its central conceit. Eventually, Mother finds weird hair growths and changes to her teeth and sense of smell. She's literally turning into a dog.
And that's…just sort of it. At night, Mother runs through the neighborhood, leading a pack of other dogs, who may or may not be other moms themselves, but the metaphor never really goes anywhere, never generates much conflict or narrative drive on its own. She's a mom. She's a dog, a domestic animal who longs to run free. It's a metaphor, see? But that's all it is.
Nightbitch has the advantage of a commanding central performance from Amy Adams, who elevates the underbaked material. But it lacks the fleshy nerve of The Substance, the willingness to take its metaphorical conceit to some logical dramatic conclusion. It's a body horror film that isn't horrific enough.
