The Fur You Can’t Brush Off

Have you ever been so exhausted you begin foregetting common words? Not dramatic amnesia, just the soft erosion of vocabulary that comes from asking the same questions hundreds of times a day. Did you eat? Do you need to go? What do you want? I watched my sister lose the word for "colander" once, standing in her kitchen at 3pm, holding the object itself. She called it "the pasta catcher."

Nightbitch knows this territory. Marielle Heller's adaptation of Rachel Yoder's novel opens in the fog of early motherhood, where a former artist known only as Mother cycles through the same rituals with her toddler while her husband travels for work. The setup is familiar, perhaps too familiar, and the film seems aware of this, pushing quickly toward its central conceit: Mother is turning into a dog. Patches of fur. Sharper teeth. A hunger for raw meat.

The metaphor is blunt. I mean, it's essentially a bumper sticker. And yet.

Amy Adams plays the transformation with a physical commitment that earns more goodwill than the script sometimes deserves. When her husband asks, with genuine bewilderment, what happened to the woman he married, she fires back: "She died in childbirth." The line lands because Adams throws it like something she's been holding in her mouth for months, tasting its bitterness, waiting for the right moment to spit it out.

The problem is that Heller can't quite decide what kind of film she's making. The early domestic sequences have a grinding authenticity, quick cuts that communicate the accumulating weight of days that blur together. But the supernatural elements, when they arrive, feel almost apologetic. Mother barks in a grocery store, runs with neighbourhood dogs, and the film flinches. It wants the wildness but keeps reaching for reassurance. By the final act, there's a troubling sense that everything strange might just be metaphor, stress, something to recover from rather than reckon with.

I found myself thinking of Safe, Todd Haynes' 1995 film about a woman whose body rebels against suburban existence. That film refused comfort entirely. Nightbitch keeps offering it, then seems embarrassed by its own generosity. Or maybe, and I'm genuinely uncertain here, the reassurance is the point. Maybe this is a film about how motherhood requires you to tame yourself eventually, to come back inside, brush off the dirt, pretend the wildness was a phase.

There are moments that work completely. A fantasy sequence where Mother snaps at a patronising acquaintance before the scene rewinds to her polite, frozen smile. The toddler's face, radiant and demanding, shot with the kind of unflinching attention that suggests Heller actually remembers what it's like to be needed that completely.

Adams deserves better connective tissue between her quieter scenes and the body horror that never quite commits to being horrifying. Scoot McNairy does what he can with a husband written as a convenient absence.

What stays with me isn't the transformation. It's the weight of repetition, the particular loneliness of being someone's entire world while feeling like no one's priority. The film captures that, then doesn't quite trust it to be enough.

Perhaps it wasn't ready for its own premise. I'm not sure I was either.