In its least manageable moments, early motherhood must feel like an unpaid job with no breaks, an inarticulate boss and working conditions designed to strip all that’s civil from one’s sense of self. But “Nightbitch,” a sincerely surreal domestic fable from writer-director Marielle Heller (“A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”), posits a last refuge: If one is going to the dogs, then jump in on all fours.
Amy Adams’ harried, short-tempered suburban mom is, by all accounts, exactly the kind of attentive, loving and accommodating parent to her 2-year-old boy that society wants (OK, demands): there for the cooking, the cleaning and playtime; there for sleepless nights and tired days; there for guitar-accompanied book time at the library with moms who always seem more put-together; there to jump in when dad (Scoot McNairy) glides in from his business trips and shows cluelessness about child care.
Sure, pretending to be doggies with an enthusiastic toddler looks like fun and mommy used to be an artist, so there are still some creative sparks left in a brain that has long ceded individual identity to full-time motherhood. But some deeper canine instincts are also at work: She’s growling more, noticing more scents and attracting friendly neighborhood dogs at the park, a pack that also seems to silently beckon her. Then there are the changes that feel closer to a Cronenbergian freakout: curiously dense new tufts of back hair, slightly sharper teeth, a body count of dead critters each morning on the doorstep.
“Nightbitch,” adapted from Rachel Yoder’s Kafkaesque comic novel, is no body-horror movie though, as squeamish as you might feel about the sprouting-tail imagery, or, if you’re a mother, triggered as you might be by the indignities. Adams’ unnamed character vocalizes a lot of them, but it’s better when we can feel them, as in the blackly amusing montages of parenting’s crushing sameness that play like long-overdue middle fingers to every movie or commercial that ever cut together sweetly homey moments into impossible utopias of Hallmark warmth.
The movie’s mutt-amorphosis is really a kind of reverse idealism, in which an exasperated new mother’s road to freedom is acceptance of a transforming self’s powerful, beastly urges and heightened senses — not pushing them away but embracing them. Offering support at key moments is a knowing, keen-eyed librarian (Jessica Harper), a mysterious book about the hidden history of magical women, and suddenly clearer memories of her devoted mom (Kerry O’Malley), who may have had her own privately liberating nocturnal existence.
It’s tricky material, blending feminism, fantasy and tartly surveyed mom-com. And Heller, a confidently empathetic director who can make an observant frame feel like a hug, wisely avoids traps like demonizing the child (winningly played by twins Emmett and Arleigh Snowden) or setting up McNairy’s hapless dad simply to be a marital punchline. Still, there are moments when things feel frustratingly streamlined, suggesting that a story more warped and pungent had been sacrificed at the altar of ready-to-serve entertainment about the Secret Lives of Mothers.
And yet what always rings loud and clear and true is the formidable Adams. When given a red-meat role of physicality and nuance — animalized, her eyes swinging between adoration and primitive fire — she can handle whatever “Nightbitch” needs to be at any given moment: light and funny, dark and stormy, feral and furious, and all combinations therein. Her character in this shaggy, affable message movie may be nameless, but the specifics of her performance howl with righteous intent.
