It’s been more than half a century since Helen Reddy sang “I am a woman, hear me roar!” But the line is as good as any for Amy Adams’s ferocious performance in Marielle Heller’s more subdued-than-expected Nightpitch. Adams, identified only as “Mother” in the credits, plays a woman who gave up her career to raise her son, but only now, after four years of stay-at-home motherhood, does she realize how much the experience has changed her. “Transformed” might actually be a better word, because her primal awakening has a werewolf-movie feel to it. This mother thinks she might turn into a dog.
Novelist Rachel Yoder begins Night Pitch with the words “For my mother and for all mothers.” This may sound like a warning to some—“Male readers (and childless women) are not welcome here”—but in fact, the dedication works as a kind of prescription. Rather than expecting women to reinvent the wheel, Night Pitch should be mandatory reading “for all mothers.” Like Yoder’s book, Heller’s trenchant, literal adaptation operates on the premise that motherhood is primal and instinctual, a universal experience that connects humans to other wild animals. But it’s also a strange, well-kept secret that women must navigate on their own.
While thousands of mommy bloggers and motherhood authors have dedicated their lives to unraveling the mystery of the experience, Nightpitch speaks to all the moms who missed the memo. That seems to be the case for Adams’ mother, who is understandably exhausted. While her sympathetic husband (Scoot McNairy) disappears for days on end, she’s consumed with raising their son (blond twins Arlie Patrick Snowdon and Emmett James Snowdon alternate in the role).
The mother can’t remember the last time she got a good night’s sleep. She feeds the boy, cleans up his mess, and takes him to the park and the library, but she can’t interact with the other mothers—which is odd, because three of them (Zoe Chao, Ella Thomas, and Mary Holland) are friendly enough to communicate with knowing glances, as if motherhood has brought them all into the same sect. But Adams’s character doesn’t much enjoy their company, which only adds to her isolation.
When the mother interacts with other mothers, she immediately jumps to topics that “no one talks about” (e.g., “No one talks about the change that happens at the cellular level”). Is this really a secret, or is she just disconnected from the conversation? On nights when the father is away, she doesn’t even talk to him on the phone. She never goes near a computer. And when it’s time to research, she asks the librarian (a wise Jessica Harper) not for a motherhood guide but for “A Field Guide to Magical Women,” which includes chapters on “Bird Women of Peru” and so on.
Nightpatch, while consistently entertaining, greatly overstates the extent to which mothers are “misunderstood.” Not all cultures are so insensitive to maternal sacrifice—though that’s what frustrates this particular victim of patriarchy. Sinking her teeth into the mother figure as a mother might into a bloody steak, Adams bravely embodies the mother’s resentment, finding comedy in every setback. In Adams’s hands, the mother turns her identity crisis—the way “the woman she once was died in childbirth,” leaving someone she doesn’t even recognize in her place—into a monumental act of reinvention.
In a voiceover that reads a lot like America Ferrera’s “Barbie” monologue, slowed down and fragmented throughout the entire running time, Adams articulates everything this woman—a city-based artist and museum curator whose job was finger-painting with a four-year-old in the suburbs—finds unfair about motherhood itself: “How many men have postponed their greatness while their women didn’t know what to do with theirs?” Like that “Barbie” speech, Heller’s narrative is at once clear, indisputable, and still desperately needed to be said.
The truth is that society celebrates motherhood but doesn’t do enough to support it (whether that means very short maternity leave or a mother’s constant struggle to convince her father to shoulder some of her burden). This isn’t exactly breaking news, but the immense responsibility that Nightpitch depicts is one that rarely gets seen in movies, unless it’s about a single father who has to figure out how to handle it (à la Mr. Mom or Mrs. Doubtfire). Here, Adams allows herself to look almost exhausted. The makeup Heller applies to her star makes her look even more exhausted… or simply hairier, as when you notice the soft white fur sprouting from her lower back and the whiskers near the corners of her lips.
This is the first sign that changes may be coming in the wolf’s life. The second clue appears on the playground, when she inexplicably attracts three random dogs. The next thing she knows, the neighborhood dogs are leaving offerings on her doorstep, where her son finds a dead mouse and fresh “poop.” At times, despite being based on a supernatural legend, Nightpitch can feel like a cross between a memoir and a self-help book, as when the mother recalls scenes from her childhood.
She now feels a connection to her mother—“and all mothers”—and remembers (or imagines) a night when she disappeared into the woods, running on all fours like a “night cat.” The mother introduces the word as a joke to her husband one morning, and it continues to circulate in her imagination. But Heller intends to comfort us more than frighten us. This is not a horror movie so much as a healthy metaphor for anyone who feels differently after having a child.
When the mother finally transforms for the camera—a remarkable case of shapeshifting, with her back, feet, and tail in focus—she expresses her connection to the animal kingdom and her desire to escape her parental duties, if only for a few hours at a time. A well-written argument between mother and father leads to the couple announcing their separation for a time, and in the hours when the father takes custody of the child, she begins to get creative again. Once you get past the surrealism, “Nightbitch” turns out to be a surprisingly straightforward story with a clear and somewhat predictable message—a guide to domesticated sheep in werewolf movie garb.
