Heller, Marielle

Amy Adams plays a stay-at-home mom who comes to believe that she’s a dog in Marielle Heller’s adaptation of the Rachel Yoder novel.The sly, teasing conceit in “Nightbitch,” a fantasy starring Amy Adams, is that one day her character — a beleaguered, bone-weary mother — turns into a dog. That isn’t a metaphor, though maybe it is. The movie is wily on that point, even as you see her turning into a glossy-coated, tail-wagging, fang-baring canine. It looks kind of fun. Unlike poor Gregor Samsa, whose transformation into a giant insect in Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” ends tragically, the mother’s change proves exhilarating. Among other things, she no longer needs to behave like a good girl. Hers is a galvanizing rebirth, one that’s red in tooth and claw.Written and directed by Marielle Heller, and based on Rachel Yoder’s novel of the same title, the mother — she doesn’t have a proper name until she starts calling herself Nightbitch — enters shortly before her great transformation. She, along with her unnamed husband, 2-year old son and criminally neglected cat, lives in one of those nice movie houses in a leafy, generic suburban neighborhood in Anytown, U.S. Unhappy with day care, the parents have decided that the mother, an artist who’s had critical success, will stay home. It isn’t going well. Their toddler is, ta-da, a toddler, and a babbling bundle of joy, energy and raw need.The mother’s awakening begins, appropriately, with her canine teeth, which seem to be getting sharper. Her body also seems hairier. She’s puzzled but also intrigued. For his part, her husband (Scoot McNairy, in a largely thankless role) seems oblivious, his usual state. Before long, she is scrutinizing a bump near her coccyx that’s big enough to send most of us to urgent care. The mother, though, isn’t like most people; she’s a clever, at times comic, engagingly offbeat fictional vehicle for some familiar and dubious ideas about female identity as well as maternity, domesticity and femininity. All of which is to say, this is also about power.Heller’s previous explorations of the lives of women include “Can You Ever Forgive Me” and “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” her feature directing debut. For her adaptation of “Nightbitch,” Heller has retained the novel’s claustrophobic intimacy; the mother leaves the house, though it never feels like she gets out enough, in part because she’s usually with just the kid. That her interior life proves far more interesting than her material reality isn’t a surprise. Heller makes that clear early with the use of visual repetition, underscoring the monotony of the mother’s dawn-to-dusk life with shot after shot of her frying up breakfast and reading a bedtime book. The point is made quickly, but Heller keeps making it.More successful are the scenes in which you hear both what the mother says and what she thinks. To allow you to get into the character’s head, Heller has translated passages from the book’s stream-of-consciousness narration into chunks of voice-over. This makes for some nice comedy, especially when the mother’s spoken utterances are in sharp contrast to her unvarnished, panicky, annoyed voice-over. “Do you just love getting to be home with him all the time?” an acquaintance asks. Er, yes and no. Most people, though, her husband very much included, don’t seem really interested in what she says, never mind what she thinks. It’s no wonder that even when she’s nodding along with others, her thoughts run wild.The story takes a surreal turn when the mother pierces the cyst on her back with a needle, a visceral, entertaining gross-out moment that, as milky liquid oozes out, briefly shifts the movie into body-horror terrain. When she pulls a wispy tail out of the cyst, the movie slips into magical realism and starts getting down to its weird business. The mother gives the cat the side eye and chases a squirrel, her toddler giddily in tow. Then one evening, while the husband is away and the boy is (at last) asleep, she changes into a floofy dog with a luxuriant tail. Enter Nightbitch. She finds a pack, pads around the streets, runs wild.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More