Movie Reviews
‘Nightbitch’ Movie Review: Amy Adams Leads Uneven Body Horror Comedy
‘Body horror’ may not be the most accurate descriptor to qualify Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch, but the movie undoubtedly adopts many tropes when it focuses on Mother’s (Amy Adams) transformation from a human to a dog. Indeed, when a cyst appears on her back and reveals a large tail full of pus, one may be inclined to say that this dark comedy veers into such territory, and rightfully so.
The ‘body horror’ itself is appropriately gross and immediately destabilizes both the audience and the protagonist, who discovers a side of her she didn’t realize she had until now. ‘Mother’ (both parent and kid characters are unnamed because it could be you, me, or anyone else) has been living absolute hell parenting her Son (played with an impeccable sense of comedic timing by twins Arleigh and Emmett Snowden). Like any mom at this stage in her life, she attempts to set unattainable goals for her child to be tended to, whether going to the library for a torturous ‘Book Babies’ session or taking her son to the park with almost certain death waiting for him if she doesn’t always pay close attention to what he is doing.
Of course, it doesn’t help that her son is ineffably cute but incredibly chaotic (the innocent charm they have at this time is deadly for many parents who want to teach them the right way to do things patiently but are unable to do it because of how cute their child looks at all times). From saying the F-word in public to purposefully breaking dishes and then crying about it, he’s certainly not helping her mother have an easygoing time with him, as lovable as he may be. However, Mother’s life isn’t going the way she wants to. She is forced to do everything for her son and absent Husband (Scoot McNairy), which leads her to sacrifice the promising career she had in art to be a stay-at-home mom. At that moment, her sense of smell begins to develop, and she starts experiencing profound physical changes in her body that lead her to believe she is slowly transforming into a dog.
In its opening scene, Heller, cinematographer Brandon Trost, and editor Anne McCabe intelligently represent Mother’s chaotic, overwhelming life through aesthetic choices reminiscent of Monia Chokri’s Babysitter. Extreme close-ups of Mother’s routine acts (putting butter in the pan and frying hash browns while attempting to subdue her son’s deafening cries), quickly edited together, pervert what the idealized ‘joys’ of being a mother are. In this case, Son acts more like a burden than the boy she unconditionally loves. Heller then directs her audience to Mother’s ragged hair, tired eyes, and wrinkles on her face that seem more apparent than they should, not because of her age but due to her constant sleeplessness and heightened stress levels.
This immediately pulls us into the on-screen adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s book of the same name, to which Heller then takes an immediate dark turn (a bold swing for some who may not know what this film is about). The attentive filmmaker she has always been (see her masterpiece, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood), Heller still ensures there’s a profound bond between Mother and Son, either through fleeting moments of love as she reads him a bedtime story or as they hold their hands together while running after dogs in a park.
There’s a sweetness buried inside their relationship that has unfortunately been lost when Mother has been tasked to do everything to please him and her neglectful husband, who would rather fly away from familial problems than face them head-on. In fact, in one of the film’s most powerful scenes, Husband asks Mother, “What happened to my wife?” as he wonders how she became so depressed, bitter, and angry at herself, the world, and her husband. She bluntly responds: “She died in childbirth.”
This seems to be Nightbitch’s central thesis, illustrated by an unexpected transformation into a fierce canine, which helps her reclaim the story she wants to make for herself. The metaphor is apt and sounds rich enough to be pushed to its fullest extent. But just as it’s about to go all in on its kooky, almost otherworldly storytelling, Heller decides to stop the movie dead in its tracks and not develop any of its ideas, nor the characters who seem rife with potential. For no reason whatsoever, the editorial (and thematic) choices begin to squander any attempt at fleshing anything out of its characters and central story.
The end result seems more confounding than anything else because it feels like the movie is trying to do far too much in such a short time (98 minutes). As it moves away from the thrilling, almost unique body horror, Heller also loses her aesthetic impulses that made the movie’s first half so compelling and often funny to watch.
The original source material may be too ambitious to transpose on screen. However, when so much of the movie does work in its opening section, it seems baffling that Nightbitch would lose its most interesting parts in favor of absolute nothingness. But it also seems afraid to commit to one genre or a thematic throughline,to keep us invested. Had it fully leaned into body horror, it could’ve gone in a completely different direction than its massively unconfident script allows.
Thankfully, Adams always seems to give a damn and represents Mother’s psychological torment intelligently with enough empathy and compassion for the audience to attach themselves to her plight. Her most nail-biting line deliveries are expressed with the energy of a thousand flames (and how her eyes shift in key scenes exacerbates this feeling), alongside voiceover narration that solidifies all of the emotions she can’t express physically. But she’s also frequently outshined by the Snowden twins, who literally steal the spotlight from her and run away with it.
They have no shame in doing so, either, with note-perfect comedic timing that balances out their charming, lovable exterior. The cutest kids are usually the most troublesome. Heller understands this inextricable fact and displays it to us for all the world to see. However, she shows an insatiable chemistry between the two that makes it instantly believable that Mother will do anything for her Son, even if it mentally and physically exhausts her.
All of this is finely presented and depicted with thunderous energy during Nightbitch’s opening half. It’s why it feels so disappointing that Heller never fully commits to either her premise or the themes she lays out, concluding Nightbitch with an admittedly funny coda to an otherwise middling and disappointing affair. It may not be as bad as Heller’s feature directorial debut, but it certainly won’t be remembered as her finest effort, either, especially coming off the heels of her best-ever film.
Nightbitch releases exclusively in theatres on December 6.
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1986 Movie Reviews – Dangerously Close, Fire with Fire, Last Resort, and Short Circuit | The Nerdy
by | May 9, 2026May 9, 2026 10:30 am EDT
Welcome to an exciting year-long project here at The Nerdy. 1986 was an exciting year for films giving us a lot of films that would go on to be beloved favorites and cult classics. It was also the start to a major shift in cultural and societal norms, and some of those still reverberate to this day.
We’re going to pick and choose which movies we hit, but right now the list stands at nearly four dozen.
Yes, we’re insane, but 1986 was that great of a year for film.
The articles will come out – in most cases – on the same day the films hit theaters in 1986 so that it is their true 40th anniversary. All films are also watched again for the purposes of these reviews and are not being done from memory. In some cases, it truly will be the first time we’ve seen them.
This time around, it’s May 9, 1986, and we’re off to see Dangerously Close, Fire with Fire, Last Resort, and Short Circuit.
Dangerously Close
I would love to tell you what the point of this film was, but I’m not sure it knew.
An elite school has turned into a magnet school, attracting some “undesirables,” so a group of students known as The Sentinels take up policing their school, but will they go too far?
The basic plot of the film is simple enough, but there is an oddball “twist” toward the end tht served no real purpose and somehow turns the whole thing into a murder-mystery. Mysteries only work when you know you’re supposed to be solving them, and not when you’re alerted to one existing with 15 minutes left.
Decent 80s music, some stylistic shots, absolutely no substance.
Fire with Fire
Oh wait… I may want to go back and watch Dangerously Close again over this one.
Joe Fisk (Craig Sheffer) is being held at a juvenile delinquent facility close a high-end all-girls Catholic school. One day while running through the forest as part of an exercise he spots Catholic schoolgirl Lisa Taylor (Virginia Madsen) and the two fall immediately in love because… reasons.
This film is just so incredibly lazy. The ‘love story’ really can just be chalked up to ‘hormones.’
Last Resort
Once again I am baffled how Charles Grodin kept getting work so much through out the 1980s.
George Lollar (Grodin) is a salesman in Chicago in need of a vacation. He loads up the family and takes them to Club Sand, which turns out to be a swingers resort as well as surrounded by barbed wire to keep rebels out.
There are a lot of talented people in this movie such as Phil Hartman and Megan Mullally, but the film lets them down at every turn with half-baked ideas of jokes. Supposedly, Grodin rewrote nearly the entire script and I think that explains a lot about how this film feels like unfinished ideas. It’s a Frankenstein monster of a script with half-complete ideas that feel like they are from completely different movies.
Short Circuit
Lets just get this out of the way: What in the world was Fisher Stevens doing?
NOVA Laboratory has come up with a new series of military robots called S.A.I.N.T. (Strategic Artificially Intelligent Nuclear Transport). Following a successful demonstration for the military, Five is struck by an electrical surge and finds itself needing ‘input.’ After inadvertently escaping the lab, it wands into the life of Stephanie Speck (Ally Sheedy), who cares for animals and takes Five in. Dr. Newton Crosby (Steve Guttenberg) is trying to get five back, while the security team wants to destroy it.
Overall, the film is thin, but harmless. The 80s did seem to love a ‘technology being used for the wrong reasons’ theme, and this falls into that camp. What is mind-blowing, however, is Stevens as Ben Jabituya, Crosby’s assistant. Not only is he wearing brown face, but he’s doing a horrible Indian accent and later reveals he was born and raised in the U.S.
His whole character is mystifying.
Honestly, a couple of decades ago I may have recommended this movie, but it’s a definite pass now just for being offensive.
1986 Movie Reviews will continue on May 16, 2026, with Sweet Liberty and Top Gun.
By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer
Posted: May 8th, 2026 / 08:34 PM
AFFECTION movie poster | ©2026 Brainstorm Media
Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Jessica Rothe, Joseph Cross, Julianna Layne
Writer: BT Meza
Director: BT Meza
Distributor: Brainstorm Media
Release Date: May 8, 2026
AFFECTION is an odd title for this tale. While it is about a number of topics and emotions, fondness isn’t one of them. Obsession, definitely. Love, possibly. The kind of general warm fellow feelings associated with “affection”? No.
There have been a lot of movies lately in which characters – mostly women – are grappling with false identities and/or false memories imposed upon them, mostly by men.
Let us stipulate that the protagonist (Jessica Rothe) in AFFECTION is not an android or in an artificial reality. However, we can tell something is way off from the opening sequence. A car is stalled on a tree-bordered highway. Rothe’s character is lying face down on the asphalt beside it, possibly dead.
But then the young woman rises, dragging a broken ankle. She experiences a full-body seizure. Fighting to recover, she sees oncoming headlights and tries to run, only to be hit by a car.
The woman wakes up in a bed she doesn’t recognize, next to a man (Joseph Cross) she likewise is sure she’s never seen before. One big confrontation later, the man says his name is Bruce – and that the woman is his wife, Ellie.
Ellie insists that her name is Sarah Thompson, and she is married to someone else, with a son. When she sees her reflection in a mirror, she doesn’t relate to the face looking back at her.
Bruce counters that Ellie has a rare neurological condition that causes her to block out her waking life and believe her dreams are real. This is why they agreed, together, to move to this isolated house, without the kinds of interruptions that can hinder Ellie’s recovery.
The set-up is presented in a way where we share Ellie’s skepticism. But Ellie and Bruce’s little daughter Alice (Julianna Layne) immediately identifies Ellie as “Mommy!” Alice appears to be too young to be in on any kind of deception, so what is going on here?
AFFECTION eventually explains this via a helpful videotape, though it’s so convoluted that viewers watching on streaming may want to replay the sequence to make sure they understand the exposition.
Writer/director BT Meza musters a sense of menace and lurking weirdness, as well as making great use of his location.
We still have a lot of questions, many of which are still unanswered by the film’s end. It may not matter to the points AFFECTION is trying to make, but a better sense of exactly how all this started might help our investment.
As it is, despite a heroically versatile performance by Rothe, a credible and anguished turn by Cross and appealing work from Layne, we’re so busy trying to piece together what’s important and what’s not and how we’re supposed to feel about all of it that it can be hard to keep track of the action as it unfolds.
Agree or not, Meza’s arguments are lucid and illustrated clearly by AFFECTION’s events. However, the movie is structured in a way that becomes more frustrating as it goes. We comprehend it intellectually but can’t engage viscerally.
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RICHMOND, Va. (WRIC) — In this episode of 8News Reel Talk, digital producer Julia Broberg is joined by anchor Deanna Allbrittin and reporter Allison Williams to talk about “The Devil Wears Prada 2.”
The hosts gave their reviews and assigned the following star ratings:
Deanna: ★★★★.5
Allison: ★★★.25
Julia: ★★
To watch more livestreams and digital video content, head to the WRIC+ Originals page. You can also watch full on-demand videos on your smart TV using the WRIC+ app.
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