Completely barking. That’s the only way to describe Marielle Heller’s meandering horror comedy about the challenges of motherhood, in which Amy Adams’s exhausted character, known only as Mother, imagines she’s turning into a dog.
Adapted from Rachel Yoder’s 2021 novel, it feels like an authentic howl from the heart, and Adams gives an admirably un-vain performance, but it’s about as subtle as a Doberman bite.
It opens with a montage of the repetitious exasperation of parenting, as Mother listens to her blonde, angelic two-year-old Son (Arleigh Snowden, terrific) prattle and gripe while cooking endless rounds of frozen hash browns.
This expands into a nightmarishly humdrum parade of mother-and-baby book groups, park visits and fingerpainting sessions. “The Wheels on the Bus” has seldom sounded more forbidding.
We learn that Mother was previously an artist (groan – should that be Artist?) but now her brain is just mush and anxiety. Meanwhile Husband (Scoot McNairy) gets to travel for work and on his periodic returns proves both tactless and useless. No wonder Mother wants to rip his throat out. Flashbacks suggest she grew up in a devout religious community and lost her own mother young.
As frustration starts to bubble into rage, Mother notices patches of fur appearing on her back, a lump that might be a budding tail and at one point, three extra sets of nipples sprouting on her belly.
Canines start leaving fresh kills on her back stoop. On a rare night out with arty chums she regurgitates her kale salad and snarfs a burger off someone else’s plate. She starts encouraging Son to eat from a bowl and sleep in a dog bed.
The film evokes the sensory deprivation of motherhood, the feeling of being simultaneously constantly alert and constantly tired. Mother’s doggy hallucinations – for that is surely what they are – are an extended metaphor for the substitution of her original sense of self for this selfless half-life, as well as the physical changes birthing a child brings.
But these observations are not particularly new, and Heller simply illustrates them over and over again. A suggestion that childbearing brings a woman, either briefly or permanently, closer to an animal state is toyed with then discarded. Ditto a mystical thread about women who physically transformed after raising children.
Adams is intensely watchable throughout, often shot in unforgiving close up but also gamely scampering on all fours at one point.
For a film that’s all about the loss of identity, though, there’s no real sense of the person Mother was before motherhood, and the other figures around her are deliberately flat stereotypes. Apart from Son, ironically, who comes across as a fully-fledged and complex person. In the end, it’s all about him.
