Five things to watch this weekend: Amy Adams sinks her teeth into Nightbitch, plus Hugh Grant gets horrific | Canada Voices

Nightbitch (Disney+)

There is something profoundly sad about Marielle Heller’s compelling new black comedy Nightbitch. And it’s not just the story, which follows an unnamed woman (Amy Adams) as she struggles in her journey from successful cosmopolitan visual artist to stay-at-home mother stuck in cookie-cutter suburbia, left to care for her young son as her well-meaning but doltish husband (Scoot McNairy) frequently travels for business. Of course, there is a profound sense of despair to Heller’s story – adapted from Rachel Yoder’s novel – which sometimes uneasily rides the line between relatability and absurdism, especially once Adams’s character begins to develop canine-like urges and habits.

But the real tragedy of Nightbitch is how the film has been dumped by its distributor Searchlight Pictures, bypassing Canadian theatres entirely (it received a very limited theatrical run in the United States last month), and only now quietly shuffling its way onto Disney+ with so little fanfare you’d think the red-carpet world premiere it received at the Toronto International Film Festival this past September was a doggone daydream.

While there is some dark fun to be had in combining the words “Nightbitch” and “Disney+” into a single sentence, the whole straight-to-streaming affair smells like a studio getting cold feet, its marketing executives simply unsure of how to sell a challenging subject that is filtered through the very particular sensibilities of its director. Not everything in Heller’s film works, mostly when themes of cultural misogyny and the silent toll of emotional labour push up against some impressively gnarly body-horror imagery. Once the more outre elements of Yoder’s novel come into play, Heller cannot quite square her extreme visuals and in-your-face metaphors with the tidier ways in which her narrative ultimately wraps up.

Yet the movie is also anchored by the genuine star power of Adams, who delivers one of her most fearless performances in a career absolutely stacked with them. (On the unofficial Amy Adams Scale, I’d rank this somewhere between HBO’s Sharp Objects and Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master.) And if you aren’t already a McNairy fan, Nightbitch will send you deep down into the rabbit hole that is the actor’s IMDb profile, up to and including his role as Woody Guthrie in the new Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown – a movie that, for some reason, Searchlight did decide to release in Canadian cinemas. How does it feel, indeed.

Matt and Mara (on-demand, including Apple TV)

An anti-meet-cute story, Canadian director Kazik Radwanski’s latest low-fi character study follows the back-and-forth relationship between a creative writing professor (Deragh Campbell, the most fearless actress of her generation) and the charismatic ex who pops back into her life after he’s become a semi-successful bad-boy novelist (BlackBerry rogue Matt Johnson). Shot over the course of months and months, the film has an improvisatory air to it, but is guided by exacting vision and tremendously felt performances from both leads, who are as close to Canadian film royalty it gets. A bonus: The money from any Apple TV rentals goes directly back to some members of the cast and crew who deferred part of their fees to make the labour-of-love movie.

Heretic (Hoopla)

For the first 45 minutes of Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’s new horror flick Heretic, the filmmaking duo – best known as the screenwriters of the Quiet Place franchise – spin a slick tale about faith and hypocrisy, dressing up a refashioned Red Riding Hood story into a 21st-century gag fest featuring an all-time capital-E Evil performance from Hugh Grant. But once the exact machinations of Heretic’s story are revealed – just why, and how, has a reclusive old man (Grant) lured two young Mormon missionaries (Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East) into his home one rainy afternoon? – Beck and Woods’s script loses its fleet footing, spiralling into something far sillier than intended. Still, you can’t help but get chills as Grant sinks his teeth into the lead role. He is as charmingly befuddled as he is terrifyingly bananas.

The Diplomat, Season 2 (Netflix)

With the second season of The Diplomat, I think that I’ve finally cracked the Netflix original drama series code. Whereas something like The Night Agent or The Recruit is just dumb-dumb, there is a slightly higher level of faux prestige with The Diplomat, which is more smart-dumb. The thriller, which continues to follow Keri Russell’s tough-as-nails U.S. envoy to the United Kingdom as she deals with the fallout to a grand political conspiracy, moves at such a rapid clip that it briefly convinces you that it has its wits about it – that it can, briefly, mirror the real-life poli-tricks that come with international bureaucracy.

But stop to pause the antics for a single second, and anyone will rather quickly realize that it is all pure pulpy nonsense, up to and including the mandatory twists that end each episode. Not that any of this is a bad thing. As far as lazy post-kids’-bedtime weeknight viewing, The Diplomat delivers enough semi-cogent thoughts to balance its murders, double-crosses and semi-sexy bedroom subplots. But man, Russell still cannot swear for the life of her. Once the writers’ room stops forcing the actress to hurl unconvincing F-bombs, The Diplomat might just become The West Wing for the Netflix era. (Is that a compliment? Honestly, I’m not sure.)

The Killer’s Game (Prime Video)

The world might not realize it quite yet, but Dave Bautista is the action star we all so desperately need. Physically imposing with an impeccable comedic timing, Bautista hasn’t quite found the breakout lead role that he needs to transition out of ensemble spectacles such as the Guardians of the Galaxy movies. For a hot second this past summer, it looked like he might’ve had a shot with The Killer’s Game, which finds the actor playing an assassin named Joe who is given three months to live by his doctor. Naturally, Bautista’s heavy puts out a contract out on his own life, which would allow his lover to collect on his insurance money. But, oops: Turns out the doc was wrong and now Joe has to fend off a cabal of highly skilled killers. Sounds fun, and the supporting cast that director (and long-time stunt co-ordinator) J.J. Perry assembled – including Scott Adkins, Terry Crews and Marko Zaror – promised a lot of head-crunching action. Yet the movie never even made its way to Canadian theatres, and sunk at the few that it screened inside the United States. I have a hunch, though, that this is just the kind of hard-core action movie that will play perfectly at home.