Six-time Oscar nominee Amy Adams goes barking mad in the first trailer for Nightbitch, the upcoming horror comedy from Marielle Heller (The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Can You Ever Forgive Me?) releasing in theaters via Searchlight Pictures on December 6.
Based on the novel of the same name by Rachel Yoder (who also penned the screenplay), Nightbitch has been described by Heller as “a comedy for women, and a horror movie for men.”
Alongside Adams, Scoot McNairy (Blonde, the upcoming Speak No Evil remake) and Mary Holland (Happiest Season) also star.
Nightbitch gets its world premiere at Toronto International Film Festival later this month, and an official synopsis from the TIFF site reads:
Amy Adams plays Mother, a former city-dwelling artist and curator who chooses to stay home (now a suburban home) with her toddler son as her husband travels frequently for business. She loves her son deeply, but that does not prevent her from feeling isolated and exhausted. How did her life become a numbing grind of diaper changes and cutting bananas into little pieces? Still unstrung from an extremely unsuccessful attempt to connect with other mothers at the library’s Baby Book Time, and unable to keep her emotions bottled up inside any longer, Mother begins to see and hear things in the night that beckon to her. Soon, something primal and feral rises up within her, allowing her to unleash — and return to — her inner power and identity.
Scoot McNairy plays Mother’s Husband, a relatable, sensitive man struggling with his own challenges around parenthood. But make no mistake, this is Adams’ film. It is her fearless, unselfconscious, and fiercely intelligent performance that makes Nightbitch such a memorable experience. Heller weaves drama, comedy, and significant elements of magic realism into an audacious and important film, examining those aspects of motherhood — both dark and darkly humorous — of which we rarely speak.
From the synopsis and trailer, Nightbitch already looks to be a strong new entry into the ‘motherhood as horror' canon, joining modern classics like The Babadook and mother! as movies that dissect the real-life terrors that come with being a mom.
The trailer also teases some of the bizarre body horror that Nightbitch promises, a transformation that Adams (in the aforementioned Vanity Fair interview) called “terrifying”:
“The thing I really attached to is this idea of loss of identity […] It felt so organic, because there’s many a day where I look at myself and I’m like, ‘Well, that’s new. What’s that?’ It just sort of became an extension of the way our bodies evolve as we go through different metamorphoses, be it childbirth or aging […] I wasn’t judging anything as it was going on. I wasn’t judging my physical appearance. I was just in the character so much. So, yeah, I suppose that can feel liberating at times, but also terrifying.”
Nightbitch hits theaters on December 6.
