Forget Hillbilly Elegy, Amy Adams is our Nightbitch now

There’s been a little too much talk about Hillbilly Elegy of late. Las Culturistas’ Matt Rogers speculated that if we’d only given Amy Adams her Oscar for Arrival, she never would have done Hillbilly, and then maybe we wouldn’t be dealing with JD Vance as our potential Vice Presidential nominee. (There’s a small kernel of truth there—a friend of Vance told The Washington Post in 2022 that the online backlash to the movie was Vance’s “last straw” that pushed him into the arms of the political far-right.) Put all your skepticism aside for a second and accept this absurd premise. If a terrible Amy Adams movie has the power to change the world for the worse, could a great one change the world for the better? If so, please, please let Nightbitch be good. Or at least let it earn her the Oscar she should’ve won 10 to 15 years ago now. 

Vanity Fair has the first look at Nightbitch, directed by Marielle Heller (Can You Ever Forgive Me) and produced by Adams. The upcoming movie is a surrealist parenting tale about a woman trapped in the monotony of motherhood who suspects she’s becoming an actual dog. She starts to grow fur and finds the bump of an actual tail and even sprouts extra nipples. ““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?’” Adams tells the outlet. “It just sort of became an extension of the way our bodies evolve as we go through different metamorphoses, be it childbirth or aging.” Heller notes that the movie required de-glamorizing Adams’ movie star image (Oscar pundits take note!), but “I wasn’t judging anything as it was going on,” Adams says. “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.”

The VF images don’t give away any of the weird body horror (there’s some photos of a regular human-looking Adams bonding with dogs), but the actor, director, and novelist Rachel Yoder help connect the throughline between the wild premise and the wildness of real-life motherhood—the idea of “loss of identity,” as Adams says. “I have this memory of having food poisoning when my son was really little. I was throwing up, and he toddled in and started nursing on me while I was lying on the bathroom floor,” Heller adds, making her feel like “‘My body is not my own anymore. This is so fucked up.’” 

You can check out the full first look over at Vanity Fair, and hopefully erase any sub-par entries in the Amy Adams motherhood canon from your brain. (Dear Evan Hansen, you are just as much a culprit as Hillbilly Elegy.) This one, Heller says, is about “motherhood and rage.” Amy Adams fans, it’s time to get that campaign back up and running for when this movie comes out on December 6.