I I have to be careful when describing the movie Nightbitch. Not because of spoilers, but because there is a very real danger, I’m going to go through it frame by frame. And that’s not because it’s flawless in its depiction of motherhood in the early years – what it does to a person’s self, relationships, body, and orientation to the world. More because I’ve never seen it on screen from the mother’s perspective with anywhere near this level of accuracy.

“Becoming a mother is such an over-idealized moment in culture,” says director Marielle Heller, and her star Amy Adams’s words come thick and fast when I meet her in London. “And then when you go through it, you’re like, ‘What?! This is not what I expected.’ And then you feel like you’ve failed because you assume that everyone else has the idealized version and that there’s something wrong with you.”

Adams, speaking more gently and forgivingly, chimes in: “I think every mother is like, ‘Why am I doing this so badly?'” Heller continues, “Why does everyone else seem to be doing so well?” Adams concludes : “I think that contributes to the isolation, this feeling of not wanting to admit your problems.”

The 45-year-old Heller is known from “The Queen’s Gambit,” in which she played the heroine’s adoptive mother and manager, whose eyes radiated pure intelligence. She is best known as a director (The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Can You Forgive Me?, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood).

Adams, 50, looks predictably Hollywood, unless you’ve seen “Nightbitch,” in which her transformation into a harried mother, the kind you might see in soft play, is eerily convincing. I wonder if it was hard to get into this after her 1999 debut, Drop Dead Gorgeous, in which she embodied perfection (though critics didn’t fall in love with her until 2005’s Junebug). the screen was great was staleness. She seems a little surprised by the question. “I really wanted to be present in the physical truth of the character. Even though she judges herself sometimes, I didn’t really judge her. I’m more likely to recognize the judgment I might have when I watch.”

Nightbitch is an adaptation of the magical realist novel by Rachel Yoder. Adams’ character, mother, has given up her work as an artist to care for her baby full-time; he is about two and a half. Her husband, who continues to work, is a lovely guy – or rather, you can smell the lovely guy he once was. Now he’s the monster who thinks caring for a toddler is like socializing and doesn’t understand why his wife can’t just be happier or at least buy milk.

Her motherly love was mixed with feelings of unbearable monotony; her feeling of having been banished from the world of adult conversation, physical attractiveness, intellectual stimulation and creative spark, and thrown into a domestic prison where shapes mean more than words: everything becomes far too much. Magic intervenes and she turns into a dog. If you love your children but have ever been driven to the wall by your role in creating them, and you also love dogs, it might feel like Heller has stolen the keys to the vault of your psyche.

In truth, it’s obvious why this story isn’t told more often: Complaining about the motherhood experience sounds a lot like not being grateful enough for your precious offspring. Apart from anything else, you wouldn’t want that them – having a mother who wasn’t grateful. Heller smiles wryly. “We always want women to be grateful,” she says. “It’s very rare that you actually feel it when you’re in the middle of something challenging. Then there’s the cycle of: I should be happier, I should be like this. And you don’t feel it.”

We don’t talk about it either because, as Heller says, “You’re so sleep deprived, the months right after birth are a blur.” I remember thinking: If anyone knew how stupid I feel, how much I feel “I don’t feel capable of even operating a car… It would be so bad for feminism if people knew how much I feel like my brain doesn’t work.”

Besides the emotional experience – its nuances and complications, the fact that it’s not a rose garden when you was I promised one of these – the physical reality of creating and producing a human being, the devastating consequences, are portrayed so brutally in the film that when I saw it, the audience was divided along generations and genders. Every woman my age (51) laughed out loud. Most of the younger ones or men stood there with their mouths hanging open in disgust. “We made the joke that this is a horror movie for men and a comedy for women,” says Heller. “There’s definitely a feeling: You can’t say that out loud.”

It’s not just tactful CGI that turns Mother into a dog. It starts with hair in the wrong places. “It’s my own hair,” Adams says. “I expanded it for the film. I said, ‘Mari, you know, I can really grow whiskers. I can do that for you.'” The scene where she grows a tail is breathtaking: imagine how cruel it is, to squeeze out a boil, but now imagine it being huge and then a thin, spindly cock shaft emerges.

“There’s this look that Amy gives at the end of that scene that’s like, ‘Well, isn’t that interesting?’ says,” says Heller lovingly. “It always makes me giggle because you don’t expect her to respond. And we talked about it. All transformations have something euphoric about them.”

Adams adds: “I wanted to show this radical acceptance of change. Here we are. What’s next? Maybe I’m just hairy now. Maybe I have a tail. I feel like this about aging: Oh, here we are this morning. That’s what we’re working with.”

There’s no reason you’ve ever seen a woman grow her cock in a movie before. What’s strange is how Heller’s sister said to her, “I can’t believe how good it feels to see menstrual blood that looks real in a movie.”

“And I thought, ‘Oh, this is my second period blood movie,'” Heller says. “I never noticed. Of course I want us to show this because I want it to be normalized. I think I’ve always felt this way: Ever since I hit puberty and got my first period, my body has been so weird and gross and interesting, and you never really see it reflected in those terms. We’re supposed to be perfect and not poop and not stink. I always wanted to see it grittier and more real.”

Next, let’s talk about incontinence. While it’s nothing new to me that women have this conversation after having children, I’m pleased to have it with Adams, whose daughter was born in 2010. (I remember going trampolining and a friend saying, “I hope you have your tenner,” and I say, “It’s really not that expensive,” and then I realize halfway through that she meant Tenas, the incontinence pads.) “I went to exercise classes and they were like, ‘Okay, jumping jacks,’ and I thought, You’re hilarious if you think that’s happening,” she says. For me, this is the feminist boundary that menstruation represented for Heller’s sister: Even when we talked forever about peeing my pants, I thought: Of course I’ll never do that write The.

When they made the film, Heller’s daughter was the same age as the child in it. When she adapted the novel for the screen, she was pregnant and then had a newborn, which made it easier, she says – details kept emerging. And working with young children is not the recipe for disaster that patriarchy is. “It’s an acting school cliché that you prepare, prepare, prepare and then throw it away and be spontaneous and present in the moment,” says Heller. “And you can say that that’s the goal, to be open to the magic that can happen in this moment. But man, if you put a three-year-old in there, you can’t be anything But in the moment and present and spontaneous. Because they will never do exactly what was planned.”

For Adams, recreating this mother-child dyad was almost like slipping into pantomime. “I’ve always approached my characters with physicality, but working with this little one you had to be so physically present. It just changes the whole ponderous nature of your walk.”

In the middle of the film – and I hope this isn’t a spoiler, but just what you’d expect when a character gets so frustrated that he turns into a dog – there’s such a catastrophic argument between the parents and the relationship almost falls apart. I told Heller and Adams that this section felt idealized. “What do you think was idealized – a man saying, ‘I was wrong’?” asks Heller. Well, pretty much. I’ve never seen such a total rollover in the wild.

“This becomes a bit of a crusade for me to show men apologizing in a film. In every film I put it in, people say it’s idealized. Or people say we can cut it out, the film doesn’t need it, it’s implicit. And people say, ‘That’s not realistic.’ It’s really problematic that we think it’s unrealistic for a man to take responsibility and apologize.”

The funny thing is that in the midst of all the excrement and the hair and the dog’s transformation, in the midst of the ugliness of the marital strife and the domestic drudgery and the kaleidoscope of love and fear and shame that is easily the most embarrassing part of the film, the mother goes into town , to have dinner with her friends from back in the day and says something crazy in the “cute thing my toddler said” section. It’s absolutely a nail-biting-on-the-blackboard thrill.

Adams took this in stride: “I embarrass myself all the time, so I have a high embarrassment threshold. I keep saying something completely ridiculous.” Heller remembers meetings in Hollywood – “suddenly being in a room full of men and thinking, ‘I only know how to talk to two-year-olds.'”

This is the ultimate explanation for why this story is so rarely told: having a baby is such a profound, mature and social experience – losing yourself and your place in the world, forming a new self and finding a new place find – but his language is baby talk and his materials are poster paints, if you’re lucky (before that, diapers). It seems like it was just waiting for two clever and very different ideas – and a bit of magical realism.