NIGHTBITCH (Searchlight/Disney – Dec. 6): Writer/director Marielle Heller tries to move outside her comfort zone with Nightbitch, following the small-scale character studies Diary Of A Teenage Girl, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, and A Beautiful Day In the Neighborhood. Here, adapting a novel by Rachel Yoder, she shifts into body horror and surrealism… sort of. The characters in Nightbitch are mostly unnamed. Mother (Amy Adams) had enjoyed some success in the art world, but she stopped working to raise Son (played by Arleigh and Emmett Snowden), her now-toddler with Mother’s Husband (Scoot McNairy). Mother finds the maternal life to be an unceasing engine of stress, and she’s consumed with envy, both of Father, who blithely ignores just about everything to do with raising Son and has a job that seems to require attendance at out-of-town meetings a full 100% of the time, and of the women she meets at Baby Book Time (Zoe Chao, Mary Holland, and Ella Thomas), who seem far more capable and comfortable with motherhood than she is. Mother starts to notice changes in her body, like sharper teeth and the emergence of something that may be the start of a tail. Eventually, at night when the rest of the family is asleep, she transforms into an actual dog, who runs through the suburban streets with a pack. The metaphors here are ripe, and Adams is clearly game for anything the role requires. Heller, however, can’t bring herself to fully commit to the magical or disturbing aspects of the tale. She consistently pulls Nightbitch to the conventional, and Mother’s relationships with Mother’s Husband and with the other moms end up being as banal as the most rote TV. It’s a waste of a star who was willing to transform herself, and of the insights into motherhood and marriage that the film does contain. Instead of leaping for the audience’s throat, Nightbitch just nudges its water dish.
THE ORDER (Vertical – Dec. 5): By-the-numbers docudrama at a very high level. The up-and-down director Justin Kurzel (the Michael Fassbender/Marion Cotillard Macbeth, followed by a disastrous reunion with both on Assassin’s Creed) is very much on his game here. Working from a script by Zach Baylin (based on a nonfiction book by Gary Gerhardt and Kevin Flynn), Kurzel grippingly recounts the all-too-topical story of a band of white supremacists in the 1980s Pacific Northwest. The violent cell is led by Bob Mathews (Nicholas Hoult), who pushes the movement into robberies and murder with the aim of fomenting revolution. On his trail is FBI agent Terry Husk (Jude Law), who partners with local cop Jamie Bowen (Tye Sheridan) and agent Joanne Carney (Jurnee Smollett) to bring Mathews down. Some of the dynamics in The Order are familiar: Husk is a renegade whose obsessiveness has broken his family apart, and who ignores the warnings of higher-ups in order to close the case, while Bowen is a smart but inexperienced deputy and a devoted family man. The actors put it across, though. Law has always had a preference toward being a character actor, and he’s reached the point in his career where he has the gravitas to play a grizzled old pro, while Hoult is startlingly believable as a shrewd fanatic. Kurzel keeps his pedal to the floor at all times (the crack editing is by Nick Fenton), and there are riveting action sequences kept to a believable human scale. Even though it’s telling a story from four decades ago, The Order is a chilling reminder that some parts of history remain current events.
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