Film reviews: Nightbitch | Grand Theft Hamlet | Rumours

Nightbitch’s bark is worse than its bite, but it’s a joy to see Amy Adams letting her freak flag fly, writes Alistair Harkness

Amy Adams in Nightbitch | Disney/Searchlight

Nightbitch (15) ★★★☆☆

Grand Theft Hamlet (15) ★★★★☆

Rumours (15) ★★★☆☆

A body horror comedy about motherhood, Nightbitch defangs some of Rachel Yoder’s source novel of the same name while simultaneously letting Amy Adams sink her teeth into the juicy role of a former artist who starts transforming into a dog in response to the all-consuming demands of parenting a toddler. Adapted and directed by Marielle Heller (The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Can You Ever Forgive Me?), the film downplays the literalness of the doggy transformation, reserving any gnarly special effects for a few choice scenes early on that externalise the physical toll having children continues to take on the body.

Thenceforth it’s more of a metaphorical transformation as Adams’ character, who gives herself the titular nickname “Nightbitch”, works through the enraging tedium of parenthood, ruing the bum deal she’s made with her well-meaning but largely absent husband (Scoot McNairy) to give up her work and spend her days scheduling toddler classes with her sleep-hating son, while navigating a parade of potential suburban mum friends who all have the same hostage-in-their-own-home look in their eyes.

The film is at its strongest when calling out all the bogus ways parenthood has been sanitised as a wondrous, fulfilling, saintly act, rather than a physically violent, messy, exhausting and largely thankless task for which women continue to disproportionately bear the brunt long after childbirth. It’s funny and cutting, with Adams’ voiceover repeatedly underscoring her character’s ironic performance of motherhood in public, and Nightbitch’s intensifying canine proclivities helping her alter ego shed the private shame that comes from wanting more from life than singalongs at the local library’s “Book Babies” class.

Adams’ facility for capturing the subtle moment-to-moment shifts in mood as her character explores the thin line between her feminine and feral selves makes her run-ragged character’s response to the recognisable hell of parenthood resonate in ways that are droll and poignant. But a few underdeveloped plot strands (one involving Jessica Harper as a mysterious librarian) make the film feel frustratingly uneven. A more savage approach might also have found a better way to rejig the novel’s darker, stranger ending without selling the character or the concept short in the way this one does. In the end, Nightbitch’s bark is worse than its bite, but it’s a joy to see Adams letting her freak flag fly.

Grand Theft Hamlet | TullStories

Set amid the open-world gameplay of Grand Theft Auto Online, Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls’ ingenious documentary Grand Theft Hamlet follows the efforts of Crane and fellow out-of-work actor Mark Oosterveen to stage a virtual version of Hamlet as a way of getting through the various Covid lockdowns in Britain when all the theatres were shuttered.

The unpredictable chaos of GTA’s mega violent multiplayer world proves a surprisingly good fit for Shakespeare too. As Crane and Oosterveen repeatedly tell random gamers whose avatars show up mid-scene trying to kill or rob them, the plays are teeming with violence and, as Grylls has also noted in interviews, the Globe Theatre in Shakespeare’s time would have been a raucous place filled with jeering crowds and prostitutes plying their trade - not a million miles from the defiantly ungenteel world of the game, where the metaphorical “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” are replaced with virtual Glocks and bullets and heist missions.

There’s meta commentary aplenty, courtesy of Hamlet’s own play-within-a-play structure. And the novelty of the screen-shot action (Grylls makes clever use of a function that allow characters to shoot footage within the game using virtual mobile phones) soon gives way to an involving real-life drama charting the way its protagonists’ quest to stage Hamlet reflects what they’re going through in their own lives at this odd and difficult time.

Rumours sees Canadian iconoclast Guy Maddin put his own absurdist spin on the apocalypse by setting it against the backdrop of an annual G7 summit and letting us experience the imminent end of the world from the perspective of its inept leaders.

Cate Blanchett leads the cast as Hilda Orlmann, the Angela Merkel-like German chancellor, whose efforts to oversee the drafting of a buzz-word-filled statement to address an impending global catastrophe keep getting derailed over lunch by the attendees’ own petty squabbles and special interests.

These include Orlman’s randiness for Canada’s man-bun-wearing prime minister (played Roy Dupuis), who in turn is lovesick after being spurned by the UK’s uptight PM (Nikki Amuka-Bird). Meanwhile, the French president (Denis Ménochet) is more interested in the recently exhumed contents of a local graveyard and America’s geriatric commander-in-chief just wants to snooze through the whole thing.

That Charles Dance doesn’t bother with a US accent to play the latter role is one of several jokes to which Madden and his co-directors Evan and Galen Johnson don’t bother providing even the pretence of a punchline. But as their characters confront onanistic zombies, a giant brain in the woods and the flummoxing linguistic peculiarities of Swedish, the relentless silliness packs a slyly satirical punch. Alicia Vikander co-stars.

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