wagi8 Amy Adams, Marielle Heller and How ‘Nightbitch’ Speaks to Women

Within the first 30 minutes of the magical realist dramedy “Nightbitch,” Amy Adamswagi8, starring as a newish parent teeming with fury and resentment, discovers that the oozing pustule that appeared on her back contains what appears to be a tail, the clearest sign yet that she is transforming into a dog.

Yet, unlike the protagonists in most body transformation movies, Adams meets the metamorphosis not with horror or shock, but with a general curiosity, an almost radical acceptance of who she is now.

“It’s a further manifestation of what had already happened through pregnancy and post- pregnancy and nursing,” Adams said in a joint interview with the director, Marielle Heller. “It was just one more thing, ‘Oh, look, I’ve got hair growing in weird places.’ I feel like we all get to that point where we stop judging things. I’m not horrified anymore by anything. I’m just like, well, there’s that.”

That somewhat serene validation by Adams’s character, called simply Mother in the credits, is what propels “Nightbitch.” This surreal examination of how motherhood changes a woman physically and emotionally is based on the novel of the same name by Rachel Yoder. Her husband is traveling for work for days at a time, and she has given up her successful career as an artist to care for their sleep-resistant toddler. Most days are tedious and exhausting until she meets a group of moms struggling with similar challenges. Her canine metamorphosis, rather than being painful and monstrous, is an almost euphoric journey of self-discovery, one that has been off-putting to some viewers and revelatory to others.

ImageAdams as Mother, coping with tedious exhausting days of parenting.Credit...Searchlight Pictures

“With a title like ‘Nightbitch,’ people are coming in really expecting a full-on genre horror film and every bit of this movie is subverting expectations,” said Heller, whose credits include “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” and “The Diary of a Teenage Girl.” Over lunch, she and Adams had a wide-ranging conversation that touched on the challenges of being a parent today, including the identity issues that often accompany motherhood and the difficulty in rebalancing equality with your partner. “It’s subverting expectations that you have of mothers and it’s subverting expectations of how you as an audience are going to feel while you watch it.”

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