NIGHTBITCH
**/****
starring Amy Adams, Scoot McNairy
based on the novel by Rachel Yoder
written for the screen and directed by Marielle Heller
BABYGIRL
**/****
starring Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson, Antonio Banderas, Sophie Wilde
written and directed by Halina Reijn
by Walter Chaw I’m sick of watching films about unhappy, beautiful, rich white people. You’ll forgive me. Maybe one day, I’ll regain the appetite to try to relate to the existential malaise they suffer in the face of their extraordinary privilege, their boring sex lives, their quotidian successes at the tops of various social ladders. To the winners go the spoils, as they say, but at least have the discretion to be grateful or, failing the urge to whine, the decency to be entertaining. In 2024, when the United States chose fascism on the back of a wave of populist xenophobia and white nationalism, I admired mid-life performances from Demi Moore and Pamela Anderson in mediocre but vaunted films rueing the loss of their legendary beauty in a culture that made them famous for, at least in part, their legendary beauty. Once objects of desire, they’ve come to have regrets. Me, too. I played my part in dehumanizing them in my time. It’s complicated.
The problem with The Substance and The Last Showgirl–and Nightbitch and Babygirl–is that the dialogue they’re having about gender inequality, misogyny, sexual dehumanization, and objectification is that there are no new insights to be had. I look at something like Chantal Akerman–not just Jeanne Dielman, but News from Home and her volcanic short films as well–and see a body of work that attempts to fulfill Laura Mulvey’s plea for a “female gaze” in the cinema. Not a movie that shows a woman’s point of view (a common misconception), but a movie that shows a woman’s labour with neither glorification nor sanctification. Work that makes the private public, in ways we seldom see. Look at Lizzie Borden’s oeuvre, Agnes Varda’s humane explorations, or Claire Denis’s astonishing and terrifying provocations. What are The Substance and The Last Showgirl, really, but distaff versions of male explorations? Surely, a woman’s experience is not so easily encapsulated as that.
Marielle Heller may be the most underestimated American director working today, which makes the aggressive reserve of Nightbitch doubly disappointing. Based on a novel by Rachel Yoder, the movie depicts the struggles of Mother (Amy Adams) in bringing up baby while her Husband (Scoot McNairy) brings home the bacon–an arrangement the two agreed upon at the beginning of their brooding. Now Mother is changing her mind. A once-promising artist, she’s barely keeping up in conversation with her pretentious grad-school friends around a too-expensive dinner at a chi-chi restaurant, no booster seats in sight. She wants her energy back, and her creativity, and she has begun to manifest bizarre physical changes–patches of fur, extra nipples–that suggest she’s becoming a dog. Not the kind of dog that does the floors and the dishes and cooks and stuff, no thanks, but the kind of dog that, at the risk of mixing too many aspirational self-help-book metaphors, runs with the wolves. For a few moments, it appears as though Nightbitch will be the distaff Wolf: a compromised and disappointing movie that admittedly (if only) soars when it explores what would happen between people were they to act like predatory pack animals. But then it hardly bothers to explore the real implications of a woman who thinks she’s becoming a dog. She doesn’t piss on anyone, or bite, or bark, even. She does yell at Husband for not being empathetic enough to her and doing his best to honour what she says she wants and asks for rather than what she wants so deep in her subconscious that she’s only recently become aware of it herself.
I’m not sure who’s aggrieved here or why. Mother’s kid, Son (Arleigh and Emmett Snowden), is not unusual in a Babadook sense and seems happy enough to run around a playground all the time because Mother dislikes socializing with other women and their children. Mother is crushed by the expectations of being a mother, see, and I get that, but because of her level of privilege, it’s not clear that she would be bound by them to the same extent. Who would judge her? Her professional liberal arts peers? Her husband, who is obviously open to any of her suggestions despite the clumsy way he expresses himself? She’s bad at communicating, too. Hence she becomes a Nightbitch: mean to Husband about his inability to take care of Son the way she does when he’s not around; mad at him for going to work like they agreed, thus giving him a “break” from Son; and then mad at him again for saying stupid shit like, “It’s a choice to be happy,” except can’t they hire a nanny? Do they have relatives? Are there any solutions short of a punitive separation, during which Husband can renew his adoration of Mother and be accepted back into the fold? There is literally a scene where Husband exclaims, “I am in AWE of you,” and this is how an equal and equitable relationship will be restored? Luckily, Husband is not so in awe of Mother that he doesn’t agree to fuck her from behind. Nightbitch is about a buildup of generations of frustration over patriarchal oppression exorcised in one convulsive fantasy in which this secret genius Kate Clark has the best gallery show ever (barefooted, naturally), a freshly re-tamed and properly re-domesticated husband scurrying and cringing at her side, and a clean victory over the simple-minded dolts in the knitting circle who are pretty much fine with being stay-at-home moms. Mother probably could’ve had all of that without acting like a fucking dick, come to think of it.
The wealthy, hyper-advantaged sad-tagonist of Halina Reijn’s Babygirl is powerful CEO Romy Mathis (Nicole Kidman), wife of soulful SNAG Jacob (Antonio Banderas) and mother to appalling children Isabel (Esther McGregor) and Nora (Vaughan Reilly). But never mind about them. Romy has desires, you see, needing to rub one out after sex with poor Jacob, who means well but can’t give her that old-fashioned humiliation she craves in order to orgasm properly. Enter intern Samuel (Harris (haha) DICKinson): pushy, insouciant, and the sort of drab, humourless, utterly-lacking-in-charisma master naughty babygirls like Romy need. Babygirl is not nearly so smart and funny as Secretary and not nearly as sexy as anything Adrian Lyne ever directed, even on a bad day; what I thought about a lot during this would-be late-’80s/early-’90s erotic thriller is how much of a shame it is that Lyne’s exceptional Patricia Highsmith adaptation Deep Water from a couple of years ago didn’t get a theatrical run. During their first rendezvous, Samuel makes Romy take a piece of candy from his hand like the dog she saw him tame on the street one day (“Do you always carry a cookie?” she asks him, seductively, in the kind of moistly purple fan-fiction that launches franchises) and then makes her piss herself (offscreen) with the assist of his digital manipulation. I’m not active on Letterboxd, but if I were, I would probably start a list of films in which Nicole Kidman urinates on people. (The Paperboy and Babygirl…so far.) Post-peegasm, Romy and Samuel’s drab affair continues, heatless and only transgressive to them–which, I mean, fair enough, sex only needs to be interesting between its participants, right? Not always, at that. Doesn’t mean it’s not a drag to sit through, though.
Some may accuse me of missing the point of Babygirl. It’s not Babygirl‘s responsibility to titillate me, and my expectation that it would make my pants tighter is part of the problem. No, the point of this film is to be a bit of meta-fiction that scolds society for making Nicole Kidman feel as though she has to alter her appearance–something touched upon by one of her character’s monstrous children. “Why do you do that yourself?” Romy’s daughter asks, referring to her mother’s plastic surgery and toxic injections. “You look like some kind of weird fish.” This happens about a third of the way through Babygirl and could easily be the inciting incident for Romy’s affair with a much younger man who is also her employee and whose salary is likely 100 times less than hers. Alas, her fascination with this young buck’s ability to master dogs and her sexual dissatisfaction with Jacob (who won’t fuck her while she’s watching porn–she’s actually too embarrassed to ask–and who also won’t fuck her while covering her face with a pillow (“I don’t want to feel like a villain!” he says)) are already well-established by then, so the lengths she goes to maintain her youth seem distinct from her desire to be dominated. Babygirl, then, pursues two separate but equally dull actualization storylines: the repressed woman finding her inner Nightbitch; and the powerful captain of industry yearning to be spanked. Also, the world is mean to aging women, and, oh yeah, after all that mortifying foreplay, let’s have normal sex the normal way. The good version of Babygirl, I have to say, is Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu, but there’s something to be said for a cluster of films about women wanting to howl at the moon arriving at the end of one of the worst years for women in the United States in generations. I’m just too starved for a good movie right now to be the one to do it.
