Is “Nightbitch” a horror film? A horror comedy? A comedy about a woman who turns into a dog? Does Amy Adams really turn into a dog? Is it really more about an ordinary marriage in danger of falling apart?
What is writer-director Marielle Heller up with this genre-defying adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s novel?
A lot. “Nightbitch” is really good, for starters. Opening Dec. 6, Heller’s fourth feature stars Adams as an artist who parks her career on a side street somewhere to devote a long road of days, nights and an ever-shrinking worldview to raise a son, mostly happily, always exhaustedly. Meantime her frequently traveling husband (Scoot McNairy) jumps in another car heading to the airport for another work trip.
“Nightbitch” is also about escape. The Adams character appears to be transforming into a dog, for real or maybe in her head, or both. Heller’s film deploys some elements of body-horror imagery, though it’s nothing compared to any of “The Substance.”
So, no, not a horror film. “It’s more about comedy and psychological drama than horror,” Heller told me in a recent interview. She presented “Nightbitch” during the Chicago International Film Festival. Her previous features — all fascinating, all almost comically hard to peg — include “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” (2015), from Phoebe Gloeckner’s weirdly funny semi-autobiographical graphic novel about a 15-year-old’s affair with her mother’s 35-year-old boyfriend. Tough sell! But a superb debut for writer-director Heller.
Then came “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” (2018), with Melissa McCarthy as literary forger Lee Israel. Everybody expected the Melissa McCarthy from “Bridesmaids,” only to find a different one, giving a thoughtful, perceptive performance of both wit and melancholy because Israel’s story wouldn’t work otherwise. Heller’s next project was the 2019 Mister Rogers biopic, “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” only it wasn’t, really. Tom Hanks played Fred Rogers, but the troubled protagonist, a magazine writer portrayed by Matthew Rhys, ran the narrative. “Subverting expectations, over and over,” Heller said, laughing. “This is why my movies are tricky to market.”
A longtime actor (“The Queen’s Gambit”) before she started writing and directing, Heller, 45, lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband Jorma Taccone and their two children. Taccone is a member of comedy trio The Lonely Island and has directed, among many “Saturday Night Live” shorts and full-length projects, “MacGruber” and “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping.” Many of the couple’s relationship stories informed Heller’s depiction of the dangerously unequal distribution of parental labor in “Nightbitch.”
The following was edited for clarity and length.
Q: With “Nightbitch,” what was most important for you in capturing the spirit, if not the letter, of the novel?
A: I wanted to preserve the feeling I had when I read the book, which is what I try for with anything I adapt. How to translate that feeling into a very different medium? It’s not like translating something into a different language. It’s more like taking a painting and turning it into a sculpture. The movie has to become a different thing. I felt seen by her book. It was like (author Yoder) had been peering into my brain, and saw all the darkest thoughts I had at the middle of the night when I was awake and rocking my baby.
Q: You’re not telling the audience how real or imagined the unnamed mother’s transformation is, really. I liked that.
A: We had talks early on about how much explanation or clarity to provide. In the end, I wanted to let the audience sit with some ambiguity. How to pull off that trick? That part was fun.
Q: Did your husband ever make the mistake of using the word “babysit” to describe a few hours of childcare, the way Scoot McNairy’s character in the movie does?
A: You know, he has never said that. There is a lot of stuff in the script that when he read it, he said, “OK, here, I think you’re being kind of an (expletive) to me.” He recognized a little too much of himself in the husband character, I think. One thing Jorma said early on was “I know how to make coffee!” (In “Nightbitch” the husband needs some help there.) But I was, like, “but you always ask how many scoops!”
It’s a thing, a constant thing. You’re out with friends, and they’ll say, “Will you look at this? He’s home making lunch for the kids, and I just got three texts about which carton to put the crackers in.”
Q: Right. I seem to remember something like that, and I’m sorry you brought it up.
A: “Who’s our pediatrician, again?” All of that. All the managing. The emotional labor. There have been so many articles written after the pandemic about the division of labor even in an evolved relationship, or what we think of as one.
There were moments in my marriage when my husband was, like, “You’re doing bedtime every night with our kid, and that’s making it so I can’t do it, because now he only wants you. And I want to. But we have to change the system. I want to do bedtime half the time, before it keeps getting worse.” That was a very helpful thing to hear, actually, and it was hard for me to change. I felt some weird pressure that if I wasn’t doing everything myself, I was doing it wrong, and that I had to never ask for help.
There’s some societal, psychological thing in our heads, as women, that makes us think we have to suffer. It has to be harder on us; we have to be the ones who take it on the chin. I don’t know, it’s so weird. It’s been a big change for me, admitting when I’m having a hard time with things. That’s been part of the wonderful experience making “Nightbitch,” choosing to be more honest about how hard it is. I still feel some pressure, as one of the few women making movies, to show the world I can do it all. But it’s freeing to be more honest.
Q: What was the parenting dynamic in your own household growing up?
A: My mom was an art teacher and is an artist. My dad is a retired chiropractor who had his own business, which my mom helped with. She was largely stay-at-home when I was very little, but went back to work once we got into school. They’re from the Bay Area, so they were ahead of their time in terms of being very equal. My dad was the cook of the family, my mom was definitely more at home, but they were feminists, Bay Area hippies trying to give their kids a better example of how to do things.
I never thought I’d have a marriage that wasn’t 100% equal. And honestly it wasn’t until having kids that the balance got thrown off, and I looked around, and thought, how did we get here? We’ve always been ambitious people, both of us. We met in college, in theater school, and there was never a sense that one person’s career was more important than the other’s. And then time goes by and I started to feel like, how is this happening? How am I cooking every meal? There was a point in the pandemic where we really got gendered. I was pregnant and cooking. We’d moved out of the city, into the woods. And we did not know how to live in the woods. He was chopping wood and I was cooking on a wood-burning stove, and it was like we’d gone back to the 1700s.
Q: So it was modeled after the ’50s? Not the 1950s, but the 1750s?
A: (laughs) Exactly.
Q: But you talked that through. Some people never do, at least in time to save the marriage.
A: I think you have to talk it through every two years. Otherwise it’s too easy to fall into the wrong patterns. Jorma and I try to switch off who’s in production at what time, so there’s always a readjustment. We’re constantly trying to switch who’s the primary parent, and who’s the secondary parent. We came up with some rules, like if you’re away for work, even if it’s hard, it’s always easier than being the one at home. Always. So always say thank you when you come home. A little appreciation goes a long way.
With movies, it’s so hard to settle for “good enough.” I’m very diligent, and I have this theory that most people making movies give up on the last 10%. But that last 10% is when you have to keep pushing, keep going. That’s my advice to directors, especially in the process of editing. When you get to a point when you just want to stop because you’re tired, go for a little longer. That last 5 or 10% — that’s when you can make something really good.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
