Notice, for one, the repetition Heller works into the early stages of what's notionally a mainstream comedy, outlining the heroine's daily routines: the cooking and feeding and dressing and cleaning and nurturing and affirming, all the work that can take the place of a career set to maternity leave. It's funny, in this context; but it also cuts to how exhausting and numbing it must be in reality, especially when you're operating as all but a one-woman show. Heller slyly delays the arrival of the kid's father on the scene: he's played by Scoot McNairy, with his magnificently rubbery, slappable face, as a man who's taken altogether blithely to this parenting lark, in large part because he gets off scot free when he leaves for the office every morning. Yet that clears more space for Nightbitch's primary selling point: one of the best comic actors of her age, doing a very solid job in a role that asks a lot of her (and finally, maybe, too much). Adams gamely undergoes the deglamorising physical transformation, and is terrific in her scenes with the kid (Heller makes her subtlest point by casting relative sweethearts - twins Arleigh and Emmett Snowden - in the latter role); she's a conduit for the very specific, blackly funny tone her director is going for - reassuring new mothers and male viewers alike that it's okay to laugh at some of this - but she also, occasionally, seems to summon a wild maternal rage. When the light goes out of her eyes, she's terrifying, and we know someone's in trouble. Heller has other weapons at her disposal: a judiciously stocked supporting cast, two or three of the finest cuts of the year, deployed to underline a point or simply slap us out of any complacency. But it's around Adams that Nightbitch feels strongest, most confident and most coherent.
That coherence, alas, begins to wane from the halfway point. Running to a skimpy-seeming 99 minutes, the theatrical version of Nightbitch has been cut to the bone, if not ripped to shreds; possibly the thinking was that one target audience will have babysitters to relieve, but mostly it bears the look of a film that was made subject to an especially torturous test-screening process, with scenes that come and go in the blink of an eye, and strands that develop more erratically than one would like. That it shapes up as by far the least assured of Heller's films is partly down to the high bar this writer-director has set for herself (The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood), but mostly down to how, from a perilously early stage, Nightbitch suggests a film that exists in many versions, each taking different paths to get to the point where the heroine is digging with her bare hands in the back garden and chasing after squirrels. At times, Heller appears to be juggling just as much as her heroine, trying to please everyone all of the time. There are questions I don't think even this release cut finds the answers to: how literally are we meant to take this transformation? How hard does Heller want to lean into the horror of this situation? How do you make a fantasy film for adults in 2024, and how do you make a fantasy film for adults that, at every turn, is still somehow in touch with lived reality? It may well have been easier for Yoder to finesse all this working on her own on the page than it has been for Heller in the context of a studio-funded awards contender; either way, this cut is broken-backed in a way that goes far beyond describing its heroine's predicament. If I retain a certain sympathy for Nightbitch, it's because its best scenes - early on, before the test audiences grew restless - hint at a rare mainstream comedy with claws and teeth. It's been a difficult gestational period, clearly; is there a chance we'll see a director's cut in a further nine months?
Nightbitch opens in selected cinemas from Friday.
