Nightbitch is a film that kinda/sort of wants to be a creature feature. It wants to dabble in its weirdness of a mom turning into a dog as much as explore the messy thoughts and feelings that come with motherhood. While the movie does tap into something both visceral and relatable, all of it comes off as little more than a scream into the void followed by a sigh of realization. Still, the screaming is cathartic enough to appreciate the volume.

Amy Adams plays an unnamed mother who has pushed her artistic ambitions aside for her son. The mom-at-home lifestyle becomes an excruciating grind of the same routine. Hashbrowns in the morning, library storytime during the day, and sleepless nights of endless storytimes. With her husband (Scoot McNairy) offering little help or encouragement, the aggravation takes hold, where mere grooming becomes a weekly luxury. Every attempt to find something more or prove her worse seems to go wrong as the mom’s life turns miserable.

All that anxiety and frustration soon transforms the misfortunate mother into a dog, further explored with her association with the sage librarian (Jessica Harper). She finds hair on her back, a heightened sense of smell, a craving for meat, and a tail growing like a grotesque mutation. It isn’t long before her transformation takes hold at night, as she runs with the dogs and hunts everything from squirrels to neighborhood cats. Explaining the dead pile of animals in her backyard presents a problem. Less of a problem, however, is how she uses this newfound transformation to better connect with her son. Her weird embracement of the dog lifestyle makes her life easier.

Of course, this weirdness is compelling for the second act, but the ending can only go one of two ways. Either things get weirder for mom as she lives as a night bitch, or she learns from her pains to better deal with her emotional state. The film chooses the second and, while that may be a disappointment for those expecting a full-blown creature-feature horror flick, there is a mildly admirable honesty for choosing the happier ending. Considering everything Adams goes through in this film, the best possible scenario is born from her dog association. She connects better with the moms, she’s more emotionally honest with her husband, and her artistic ambitions grow.

Your mileage may very on how effective all this growth is. Much of it seems to arrive abruptly for the realization, as Adams spends most of the movie stewing in her own anxiety or bathing in the absurd. As a full pallette of Adams’s acting, the film gives her plenty of room to flex in everything from body horror to overworked mom to ravenous monster to sexual aggression. There are some genuinely great moments with her, even if they are parsed out in scraps of a few different movies. Aspects of feeling detached from other parents, being embarrassed around your college friends, losing track of time, and feeling overworked are all graced here, but rarely given a moment. The hustle and bustle never stops, and even the mother’s growing bond with her fellow moms feels more like a brief stop than an emotional admittance of everything that drives them up a wall.

Nightbitch has a decent dose of motherly catharsis but not much beyond Adams’s fine performance. I did grow aggravated with how the film seems to meander around the weirdness of the scenario, presenting a bloated balancing act of themes. But for how hard the film veers into giving a stressed mom a bigger break, I appreciated a more human resolve than an animalistic spiral. The hardest part for a film like this is finding a way to end it, and there’s something to be said of how the film favors an encouraging resolution, even if it unfortunately sidelines much of its dog-related antics.