Why Amy Adams’ new movie has divided the critics

Mother is doing her best with her energetic three-year-old son. Is he adorable? Of course. They go to the park, go to readings at the library, eat the correct foods. Husband is supportive, even if he still doesn’t know how to use their coffee machine; it seems like it’s her job to run the house.

She gives hesitant vent to her frustrations; he responds by telling her that happiness is a choice. Now, that’s annoying. That’s the kind of thing that makes you want to growl.

Amy Adams in Nightbitch.Credit: Searchlight Pictures

Nightbitch, directed by Marielle Heller, is a hybrid of horror, comedy and scenes from a marriage, based on the novel by Rachel Yoder in which a frustrated, furious new mother (Amy Adams) finds a new balance in life when she starts to turn into a dog.

It earned Adams a Golden Globe nomination, but has polarised critics largely (although not entirely) along gender lines. The question usually asked in hostile reviews is why anyone needs another film about motherhood. Hasn’t this stuff been said before?

“Not enough,” says Heller. “I want to believe that we’re post this gendered, binary discussion about stuff, but this movie has shown me that we’re really not. That we’re still having very different reactions to things based on our current status or relationships. I have had some men who say, ‘Why is this important? Why is this interesting, to talk about this story? And why do I have to see period blood?’ ”

Amy Adams, known for roles such as the princess in Enchanted (2007) and the svelte confidence trickster in American Hustle (2013), turns 50 this year. More than ever, she radiates the warmth that has made her America’s sweetheart.

Amy Adams in Nightbitch.Credit: Searchlight Pictures

Raised a Mormon, she has said she is grateful for her early training in “love and compassion”, even if she doesn’t subscribe to any particular religion now; during our interview, she holds back from saying anything that could be interpreted as unpleasant by anyone.

Even expressing a preference for dogs over cats ties her in a small knot. “I can’t say that,” she says, gently. “But I do love dogs. I have a dog problem.”

It was Adams, however, who seized on Yoder’s book and took it to Heller, whose previous credits include Can You Ever Forgive Me? and A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood. Adams has one daughter, aged 14. She had read Nightbitch and recognised herself in it.

“Just that feeling of being at a loss at times, you know what I mean? Every day is different: there is a monotony to parenting, but there is also something unexpected every day,” she says. “You need this extraordinary amount of patience.”

Amy Adams, left, and Scoot McNairy in a scene from Nightbitch.Credit: Searchlight Pictures

Mother is a visual artist, but that creative self seems to have been buried in a pile of laundry. ” I really responded to this loss of personal identity,” says Adams. “Because you are really constantly evolving to meet other people’s needs.”

The advice from Husband (Scoot McNairy) about happiness comes straight from the book. “I laughed out loud when I read that. And I thought OK, I love the bigger picture of what this is talking about ... Because it’s also about relationships and community and the contrast between our internal dialogue with ourselves, the deep conflict happening inside us at any given time, and what other people perceive.”

The first signs that things are sliding off-kilter is the gathering of the local dogs on the film family’s front lawn after sundown. Mother finds herself compelled to join them, saying she is going for a run.

Then thickets of hair start to grow at the base of her spine. A new bone is beginning to protrude. Strangely, Mother is not so unnerved by the promise of a new appendage as one might expect. She looks at herself in the mirror with a little smirk of satisfaction. Woof!

Amy Adams in Enchanted.Credit: Disney

“Part of what I loved about the way she responded to it in the book – and which I tried to preserve – was this sense of perverse curiosity and mischievous secrecy of it, more like what any of us experiences when we go into the bathroom and look into the mirror and see new hairs are popping out,” says Heller.

Other flourishes in the script come from her own or her friends’ lives: the moment when Son (played by three-year-old twins Arleigh and Emmet Snowden) triumphantly puts his poo in his mother’s hand, for example, or the way the increasingly canine Mother starts to enjoy playing games on the floor.

Heller recalls giving up the fight to get her own small children sitting at the table, spreading blankets on the floor and making every night a picnic night. “We get so caught up with what we should be doing with parenting that we lose our ability to play,” she says.

“I loved that as Mother became a dog, she actually got more in touch with the joys of parenting, connecting with her kid in a real way. I think that’s such a beautiful sentiment. The moments in parenting when I’ve stopped caring how it looked, or if I was doing it right, and just been really present with my kids are the times I’ve been the happiest.”

Amy Adams in The Woman in the Window.Credit: 20th Century Studios / Netflix

Working with such small children demanded an unusual commitment from cast, crew and on-set minders. The two boys, who auditioned by playing with Adams in the park for a couple of hours, called her Movie Mamma.

“They understood that in the film I was looking after them like mamma, and if they needed anything they could talk to me,” she says. “I think having my own child really helped.

“I understood when, at the beginning, they tried to challenge me and see how far they could push me – and that really worked for the film.”

A three-year-old isn’t going to respond to line-readings; “So it’s just about rolling with it and trying not to deny anything. It’s like the rules of improv: everything is additional, everything is a ‘yes, and?’, never shut down whatever they bring. I would love to see an out-take reel of just them because they were fantastic!”

Amy Adams’s canine alter-ego, Juno, is a magnificent red husky discovered by talent-spotters, in old Hollywood fashion, at a dog shelter. She was adopted by her trainers, says Adams proudly, and is now a working actor.

For Heller, the film expresses women’s shared but largely repressed rage at the way motherhood is marginalised and often unsupported. “But what was really beautiful about the transformation was that there was also something very euphoric about it,” she says.

“A lot of women are not connected to that part of ourselves. And for many of us, it’s really going through pregnancy and birth that really make you go, ‘Oh my God, I am an animal! Who knew?’ ”

Nightbitch will stream from January 24 on Disney+.