Writer-director Marielle Heller is swinging for the fences and past with this fantasy-satire tailored from the 2021 novel by Rachel Yoder, however it shifts away from half-hearted body-horror and permits its feral growl to change into a purr of earnest assent to boring concepts of earth-mother solidarity.
Amy Adams provides what could possibly be the largest and most formidable efficiency of her skilled profession within the lead and he or she is at all times superb. She performs a girl who’s been talked into abandoning her inventive profession by her husband to be a stay-at-home mother to their vigorous little boy. Discovering herself descending ever deeper into boredom, melancholy and secret snarling rage she additionally begins to find bizarre tufts of body-hair and realises she is popping right into a canine. Scoot McNairy is strong and believable as her husband, and there’s a good cameo from Jessica Harper because the native librarian Norma, who shrewdly sees in our heroine’s eyes her ache and potential interior energy.
The simple, sensible, non-dog-fantasy a part of the movie is great on how worrying and terrifying unsupported parenthood could be. However the foolish canine scenes? The freaky look within the eye, the sudden nose-twitching sense of scent, the starvation for meat, the necessity to gallop in full doggy transformation to kill issues beneath cowl of night time? None of that is correctly scary or correctly humorous as a result of the movie shrinks from the transgressive excessive; even Adams’s (nicely carried out) breakdown in a restaurant has no actual penalties. All the things is firmly contained within the chance that each one that is only a liberating fantasy. The canine transformation is one way or the other at all times Dr Jekyll, and her “nightbitch” persona frankly by no means turns into a really fascinating metaphor for melancholy or midlife disaster. But there’s no doubting the sympathy and vehemence of Adams’s efficiency.
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