Start the week with a film: Amy Adams is barking brilliant in ‘Nightbitch’

New mothers will feel right at home in the magic realist world of Nightbitch. Sure, women who are exhausted from burping their babies or changing diapers might not morph into dogs or start snarling while in human form. They might not feel their maternal instinct overtaken by the sudden urge to kill or destroy. But they will recognise and identify with events in Nightbitch’s heroine.

She’s known only as Mother. She (Amy Adams) has set aside her career as an artist to bring up her two-year-old son. Her husband – known as Father, naturally – has a travelling job, which excuses him from the sleepless nights and dazed days that have trapped Mother.

Father (Scoot McNairy) is understanding in a meaningless way. Just hang on until kindergarten, he says. Happiness is a choice, he declares. But between the “Book Babies Reading Group” and “Tyke Treks’, Mother has lost all sense of her self – until she starts changing into a dog.

Fur and extra organs lead to the whole deal. Mother should be terrified but she isn’t. She announces: I never want to brush my hair, I want to stink, I want to be a monster.

The black comedy lampoons the fetishised parenting experience while also emphasising the loneliness and...

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