The book-to-Hollywood film pipeline will be, effectively, unreliable (I’m taking a look at you, Hillbilly Elegy, not that the supply materials in that exact case was so unimpeachably good to start with), however nonetheless, I can’t assist being excited for the forthcoming big-screen adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s 2021 novel Nightbitch. The movie, which stars Amy Adams as a brand new mother caught offguard by her sudden transformation right into a canine, dropped its first full-length trailer on Tuesday; watch it for your self under.
Yoder’s novel so expertly and visually illustrates the artwork monster trope of a mom caught between her inventive, “feral” self and her home duties that it’s onerous to think about a filmic illustration hitting as onerous as the author’s unique prose. (I imply, wasn’t the method of depicting therianthropy—which I simply discovered is a phrase for human-animal shapeshifting in narratives—at all times going to look…type of CGI-ish, and dispense with the subtlety of the writing?)
With that apparent caveat apart, Can You Ever Forgive Me? director Marielle Heller’s adaptation of Nightbitch truly has me eager to see the film, which is actually all you may ask of a two-minute snippet. Heller’s debute function, The Diary of a Teenage Woman, definitely proved that she will be able to nail the balancing act of telling a really offbeat story about ladies’s lives onscreen.
The movie appears vaguely within the mildew of Tully and early seasons of Joey Soloway’s Clear—young-ish, fairly prosperous white artist turned stay-at-home mother alternately appreciating and despairing of her home circumstances—however the feral, fable-esque twist that characterizes Yoder’s novel looks as if it ought to translate fairly effectively into Heller’s dry, fantastical sensibility.
