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 have to be careful describing the film Nightbitch. Not because of spoilers, but because there is a very real danger I will walk through it frame by frame. And not because it’s flawless in its depiction of motherhood in the early years – what it does to the self, to relationships, to the body, to one’s orientation to the world. Rather, because I have never seen it told on screen, from the mother’s point of view, with anything like this accuracy.

“Becoming a mother is such an overidealised moment in culture,” says its director, Marielle Heller, words tumbling over those of her star, Amy Adams, when I meet them in London. “And then when you go through it, you’re like: ‘What?! This is not what I expected.’ And then you have a sense of failure, because you assume that everybody else is having the idealised version and that there’s something off with you.”