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‘That’s my own hair. I can really grow whiskers’: Amy Adams and Marielle Heller on toddlers, incontinence and Nightbitch

The film adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s 2021 novel offers a whip-smart depiction of motherhood – and some icky body horror. Its director and star talk awful husbands, menstrual blood and canine transformation

I ask whether it was hard – after being exquisite on screen ever since her 1999 debut, Drop Dead Gorgeous, in which she embodied perfection (although it was in 2005, with Junebug, that the critics fell in love with her) – to swerve into frumpiness. Alongside the emotional experience – its nuance and complication, the fact that it’s no rose garden when you were promised one of those – the physical reality of making a person and bringing it forth, the ravages, are so unsparingly depicted in the film that, when I saw it, the audience divided along generational and gender lines. Midway through the film – and I hope this isn’t a spoiler but rather exactly what you would expect to happen when one character has become so alive with frustration that she is turned into a dog – the parents have such a catastrophic row that the relationship nearly falls apart.

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