Whenever we catch wind of an Americanized remake of a non-English film, a variety of questions spring to mind: “Why are we doing this">and Chastain are mothering the film, guiding it along with their subtle intensity and anxiety-inducing body language, single-handedly breathing emotional life to these characters the film only seems half-interested in accommodating. It’s a parent-child relationship that was supposed to be a collaborative artist-art relationship, and one can only imagine how restless that dynamic would be for the actresses. 4b435

And really, that might be the most effective lens to view this movie through. Céline and Alice are facing psychologically torturous turmoil from their predicament, and that turmoil is inseparable from their identities as mothers — mothers, of course, oft being burdened with many a thankless responsibilities and expectations. Simultaneously, the effectiveness of Mothers’ Instinct as a film hinges squarely on Hathaway and Chastain’s performances; a thankless responsibility all its own that could easily reflect in the dwindling mental states of their characters.

This, however, is mostly undercut by the overwhelming likelihood that the film’s failures outside of these performances were not intentional, and even if they were, it’s not exactly the easiest filmmaking strategy to get behind. Sincerity has always and will forever be the cornerstone of great cinema, and while an intentional version of the aforementioned failures would hold quite a bit of cheeky weight that we’d be wise to dissect, movies are at their best when they move you emotionally and challenge you to reconsider things about your life.

And yet, Mothers’ Instinct remains an example of the latter; presumably, it will challenge you to reconsider diving into a movie just because it has Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain in it.

Disney’s prequel to a live-action remake of an animated classic might not live up to the fans’ expectations if the opinion of critics is to be trusted. In fact, it debuted to numbers akin to Nightbitch, which isn’t the worst thing in the world, but it’s not exactly good either.

Mufasa: The Lion King may be related to the OG Lion King but in of quality, it’s pretty far off. The film debuted on Rotten Tomatoes with a critics’ score — now known as the “Tomatometer,”apparently — of 57%, which just so happens to be the exact same critics’ score/Tomatometer for the slow and kind of underwhelming Nightbitch. So does that mean we can expect a slow and underwhelming Lion King movie? Who knows, at the time of writing there are only 54 reviews for Mufasa, whereas Nightbitch has 178. It’s possible that number could go up in time, but it’s equally possible that it could go down.

If critics are to be believed then the story is boring, the visuals are ugly, and the songs forgettable. Of course, not everyone will agree but it seems, just like the 2019 Lion King, this film won’t be anything to write home about. NightBitch might have its flaws, but at least it has Amy Adams, who’s a good enough actor to make anything watchable.

Over on X, it seems as though fans are getting sick of the constant live-action remakes and general lack of originality with modern Disney movies. Some wanted to know who even asked for this unnecessary prequel, while others pointed out that the Lion King remake from 2019 received similar reviews yet still managed to rake in an impressive 1.6 billion at the box office.

the first one was rated similar by critics and still made like $2 billion.

— Jay (@YngJackieAprile) December 17, 2024

It’s true, the 2019 film has a 51% on RT but made enough money to recreate Pride Rock with dollar bills. But high box office numbers don’t necessarily mean a film will be good. In the years since the 2019 film, many have not been as kind to The Lion King remake. The soulless look of the animals and the fact it’s basically a shot-for-shot remake of the 1994 animated film have all been common points of criticism.

Mufasa might have learned from the mistakes of its predecessor but many online just don’t seem surprised at the possibility that the film could be a disappointment, which shows that the good faith Disney has built up over the years is slowly being eroded away by sub-par movies. 

I mean is anyone genuinely surprised about this lol pic.twitter.com/nxIdlC5mNC

— LuckyPuyo (@LuckyPuyo) December 17, 2024

Audiences are also annoyed at the lore of The Lion King being changed for the worse.

Most seem more excited about the Sonic the Hedgehog sequel and are prematurely celebrating a win over Mufasa.

Told yall Sonic will be 10x better pic.twitter.com/iNyK7SxtQB

— MIGHTYON3 (@mightyon35) December 17, 2024

Of course, Audience scores tend to differ dramatically from the critic scores, so maybe Mufasa will prove everyone wrong by surprising audiences and making billions at the box office again. This is The Lion King we’re talking about here, one of the most beloved movies of all time, but still, as Scar would say: be prepared… for this film to disappoint.

With A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, director Marielle Heller established herself as one of Hollywood’s most promising emerging voices. So, when news broke that she would be adapting Rachel Yoder’s novel Nightbitch, with Amy Adams attached to star, hopes were high Heller would use the creative freedom that comes with genre cinema to deliver a poignant analysis of the burden of maternity. Unfortunately, Nightbitch never fully embraces its fantastical concept, preferring the safety of easy platitudes to deliver its message.

On paper, Nightbitch sounds deliciously weird. The movie follows Adams as a stay-at-home wife who struggles to keep her identity beyond the role of a mother. Appropriately identified as Mother, Adams’ character represents the complex relationship many mothers develop with their children, simultaneously a source of joy and why so many women forego their dreams and independence. Cornered like a wild animal in the dullness of a repeating routine, Mother slowly realizes her body is changing. As days , Mother discovers the incredible ability to turn into a dog, running through the streets while her husband and son sleep, unaware that the housewife releasing the primal energy she bottled up for so long.

Just glancing at Nightbitch’s premise reveals a rich tapestry of inspired ideas, as Adams’ feral dispositions speak volumes of the anguish mothers deal with alone and in silence; however, as critical as the themes weaved into Nightbitch’s script might be, the slow pacing, unnecessary voiceovers, and refusal to put the wacky concept front and center drain the movie’s potential to become a new feminist classic.

Let’s get something clear: Nightbitch is an important movie. In the past couple of decades, the feminist movement has regained new strength as a record number of women reclaim ownership of their bodies and refuse the notion that they have a specific role to play in the world, that of procreators. Yet, recent political developments underline how the battle is far from won. The idea women were born to be mothers persists. Even worse, there is pressure for mothers to be nothing but happy, as any sign of discontent leads to questioning their love and dedication to their children.

In reality, human beings are complex creatures. There’s more to us than the basic need to eat, sleep, and contribute to preserving the species. Our relentless quest for meaning shapes our relationship with the world around us. So, more often than not, this results in contradictory ideas sharing the same place inside the mind. Case in point, it’s perfectly normal to love your children and still resent the lack of time and energy that comes with parenthood. Plus, in the case of women, the fact that caring for children is viewed as an instinctive vocation often leads to the abandonment of careers, hobbies, and even friend circles.

It’s this net of conflicting feelings that fuels Nightbitch’s narrative. In the movie, Adams’ Mother clearly has a genuine connection with Son (played by Arleigh and Emmett Snowden). They share quality time together, and she’s often in awe at her child’s ability to evolve and become a layered person, one day at a time. Even so, that’s not enough for Mother. She wants to be more than the caretaker of her son. She needs to find spaces she can fill with desires that belong to her and no one else. That’s why she eventually turns into a dog, a violent transformation unleashing the rage she locks in her heart.

The importance of Nightbitch only makes its script more disappointing. Even though the movie’s marketing has focused on the dog-turning aspect of the plot, the final cut is surprisingly tame regarding supernatural elements. Mother’s secret canine life takes the backseat of the story, only popping up occasionally in between long sequences in which she struggles with her everyday life. 

Heller deliberately chose to keep things as grounded as possible to underline the distress that comes with motherhood; however, without a proper magical realism approach, Nightbitch becomes too mundane for a larger audience to get hooked on its plot. People who have given birth can identify with Mother’s woes on an imitate level. For everyone else, though, Nightbitch offers little else after its first half hour. Once the point has been made, there’s nothing left to say, as the same message will just get hammered down until the movie comes to an unsatisfyingly banal conclusion.

The questions Nightbitch raises are not simple to answer. Yet, the movie tries to resolve all the conflicts in a bland ending that resembles a rom-com, a disappointing writing choice. Plus, Heller wants to ensure everyone gets what Nightbitch is about, so the narrative flow is frequently interrupted by Adams’ voiceovers in which her exact feelings are described in detail. To make things worse, these voiceovers sound underwhelmingly ready-made, preachy, and sometimes even shallow. If the movie more or less works despite all of this, that’s largely thanks to Adams’ commitment to the role.

It’s fascinating to watch Adams navigate Nightbitch’s turbulent waters, and if for nothing else, her brave choice to play such a raw character is enough to give Nightbitch a go. Like Demi Moore in The Substance earlier this year, Adams is unafraid to use her body as a storytelling tool, showing scars and changes that reflect the damage maternity inexorably causes women. In an industry where unobtainable beauty standards are expected to be pursued by actresses, it’s commendable to see Adams swim against the flow and use her inhibited talent to make such a controversial character come to life.

Nightbitch is also aided by its impeccable technical aspects. Heller repeatedly proved that she is an outstanding director, capable of giving intention to every frame of her movies. In Nightbitch, the editing is also a marvelous tool, capable of presenting the monotony of Mother’s life in an unnervingly suffocating way that reflects how motherhood can become a prison. This might not be enough to turn Heller’s latest into the hit it deserved to be, but it prevents the film from fully sinking under the weight of its unfulfilled ambitions.

That’s not to say Heller should stay away from genre productions. On the contrary, Nightbitch shines the most when exploring the dark corners of its premise instead of being self-righteous about its message. These scenes make us wonder what a Heller movie would look like if she went all in for the uncanny instead of constantly backpedaling in the name of well-intended but ultimately misguided didactics.

When Amy Adams signed up for the horror comedy Nightbitch, she probably wasn’t aware of the impression it would make on viewers. But after it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, the actress revealed that people have been commenting on her appearance in the movie and seemingly missed the point of her less-than-flattering look.

“I’ve had people be like, ‘Oh my gosh, you looked awful,'” Adams told Variety. “I was like, ‘You do realize that’s what I look like in my life, right?'” Written and directed by Marielle Heller, Nightbitch tells the story of a stay-at-home mom whose resistance toward domesticity and motherhood slowly causes her to turn into a dog. Despite the outrageous premise, a deeper look reveals that it serves as an allegory of motherhood and the various challenges that go with it.

Adams also talked about the Superman movie and gushed over her Man of Steel co-star Henry Cavill while offering advice to new Lois Lane actress Rachel Brosnahan. “I love her. She’s gonna be great. Hopefully the role will be infused with her sensibility and her natural humor and strength and wit,” she said. “Henry was a really brilliant Superman. I offer every Superman luck and stuff, but I think he was great. I just wanted to say that. It’s so in his spirit.”

Adams and Cavill had great chemistry as Lois Lane and Clark Kent/Superman, with the Daily Planet’s star reporter serving as the Kryptonian’s tether to reality during his rage-filled trance in Justice League. The scene in which the momentum of the story shifted proved that Lois was more than just a love interest for the superhero, but an anchor for the most powerful being on Earth who needs love and comion to stay connected to his humanity.

Now that the Lois Lane torch has been ed, Adams is focused on Nightbitch and the freedom that came with the role. “I love the metaphor of her connecting with a more primal and feral side of herself in order to learn how to let go and be present and engaged and flexible and find her joy,” Adams said about her character. She also compared it to her personal experience as a parent. “Motherhood did redirect my priorities. And I think that changed some relationships. That was hard, but I don’t think it’s uncommon,” the actress explained.

According to Adams, she would have been too insecure to sign up for a project as wild as Nightbitch earlier in her career. But since she’s become more comfortable with herself, it was the right time to try something different. Despite the performance being (arguably) Adams’ best work, the movie still received a mixed reaction from those who’ve seen it. The biggest complaint was that the story came across as a jumble of ideas. Those who enjoyed the movie mostly loved its feminist themes.

Based on Rachel Yoder’s 2021 novel of the same name, Nightbitch also stars Scoot McNairy, Arleigh Snowden, Emmett Snowden, Zoë Chao, Mary Holland, Ella Thomas, Archana Rajan, and Jessica Harper. The movie will hit theaters on Dec. 6, 2024.

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Yesterday, Searchlight Pictures released the first official trailer for Nightbitch, the Amy Adams-led horror-comedy that’s due to impress at the Toronto International Film Festival this weekend before hitting theaters in December.

The film stars Amy Adams as a woman known only as “Mother” (and like that, we’re off to the races), who puts her career on hold to focus on being a stay-at-home mom to her young son. It doesn’t take long for the usual motherhood stressors to work their way into Mother’s life; cleaning up after the child, putting the child to bed, lack of sleep, a husband who seems incapable of comprehending the position she’s in, and the peculiar sense that she’s slowly transforming into a dog.

Nightbitch‘s plot, however, is not the popular talking point; it appears that Searchlight thought they could pull a fast one on the denizens of X by sneaking a title like Nightbitch into the zeitgeist, but the internet’s ever-reliable puritan sensibilities quickly led them to batting their eyes over a Hollywood picture sneaking “bitch” into the title.

Others felt a need to take Nightbitch at face value, and to completely ignore the fact that it’s based on a very well-received novel of the same name, to boot.

Social media is, of course, no place for critical thought; it’s all about being as animated and reactionary as possible, and with Nightbitch serving up the premise that it does, the trailer makes for easy scorn fodder for anyone who’s solely committed to scorning things.

But let’s examine things a bit more closely and sincerely. Nightbitch, the 2021 debut novel by Rachel Yoder, is only textually about a woman turning into a dog. What it’s actually about is the pressures and contradictions that motherhood places on a woman’s social and physiological being. Motherhood is a task that somehow demands both an animalistic commitment and a mechanical unbreakability; this is where Nightbitch‘s interests lie. By all observations, the film seems to be channeling a similar energy here.

Moreover, film explores these ideas in ways the book never could; Nightbitch might not necessarily be better than the novel, but there’s inherent value in the simple act of diversifying the presentation of an idea like the transformation of motherhood, medium-wise. Meanwhile, the importance of the idea alone speaks for itself, to say nothing of the space it might occupy in the genre of horror-comedy.

But nevermind looking deeper; let’s all laugh at the weird-looking movie with “bitch” in the title instead. Surely that’s a much better use of one’s time. Jokes aside, watching this movie for opinion-forming purposes would genuinely be a good use of one’s time, if one insists on talking about it, which we can all do when Nightbitch hits theaters on Dec. 6.

Nightbitch, the neo-noir thriller helmed by Marielle Heller is set to begin production soon, and it’s gained some hefty firepower over the course of its pre-production stage, with Searchlight Productions winning the rights bid at $25 million and casting two-time Golden Globe winner Amy Adams in the lead role.

Adams is set to star as a woman who, in the midst of raising a toddler in her home in the suburbs while her husband is absent on of his business trips, begins to connect with some of the more feral emotions that come with being a mother, and it’s not long before she convinces herself that she’s transforming into a dog.

Naturally, Twitter is absolutely eating this premise up.

Nightbitch is based on the 2021 novel of the same name by Rachel Yoder, who is also credited with writing the film’s screenplay.

Adams most recently appeared in the 2021 film Dear Evan Hansen as Cynthia Murphy, the mother of Connor. Some of her most notable recent credits include Dr. Louise Banks in the sci-fi drama Arrival and Lois Lane in the DCEU films Man of Steel, Batman v Superman; Dawn of Justice, and Zack Snyder’s Justice League. She’s also set to lead the cast in the Disney Plus film Disenchanted, where she will reprise her role as Giselle Phillip from the 2007 film Enchanted.

Heller’s most recent directing credit was the critically-acclaimed Fred Rogers biographical drama A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.