Stop me if you have heard this one before: In her latest movie, the brilliant Amy Adams plays a new mom who is overwhelmed by her son’s inconsistent sleep schedule, his fussy appetite, and the droning repetition of the day-to-day schedule that includes play dates, kid music, and messes. But at night, “Mother” (Adams) believes that she’s turning into a dog. OK, wait… I was with you until that part. But that’s the plot of NIghtbitch, an adaptation of a 2021 novel written by Rachel Yoder that burrows into the primal feelings of motherhood, and features a blistering performance by the always reliable Adams. When is Adams not good? It’s very rare. In fact, there’s a scene in Nightbitch that maybe was too convincing, as it forced several crew members to leave the set while director Marielle Heller filmed it.
This isn’t a spoiler. In fact, it might make you more curious for the lengths that Marielle Heller and Amy Adams went to create the atmosphere on Nightbitch. Throughout the movie, when the evening approaches, the overwhelmed “Mother” (Adams) begins to give into some animalistic urges. We’re never 100% sure if they are real or imagined. And in one, Mother thinks that she sees a growth on her lower back. It starts as a boil. But as she digs at it, it bursts open, and a dog’s tail emerges. It’s beyond gross.
This isn’t a spoiler. In fact, it might make you more curious for the lengths that Marielle Heller and Amy Adams went to create the atmosphere on Nightbitch. Throughout the movie, when the evening approaches, the overwhelmed “Mother” (Adams) begins to give into some animalistic urges. We’re never 100% sure if they are real or imagined. And in one, Mother thinks that she sees a growth on her lower back. It starts as a boil. But as she digs at it, it bursts open, and a dog’s tail emerges. It’s beyond gross.
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00:00I want to ask about the creation of Amy's tail.
00:03I want to know if you went through different iterations before you landed on the strands.
00:08You're talking about with the needle, yes?
00:11Yes.
00:13Okay.
00:14Well, spoiler alert for people who haven't seen the movie.
00:16The biggest kind of most disgusting groany scene of the movie is when she
00:21pops a cyst on her lower back that reveals a tail.
00:26Um, the creation of that was very complicated.
00:30We made a prosthetic version of her body and it was puppeted and operated basically with
00:37hand doubles and people underneath who were squirting out pus and feeding hair in through it.
00:46I found this whole process hilarious.
00:49There were some people on set who were so disgusted that they
00:52actually couldn't be in the room while we filmed it.
00:55Um, you know, it was interesting because I wrote it knowing that I wanted it to be
01:02sort of the most viscerally disgusting moment that you saw on screen.
01:07But, um, everybody reads something slightly differently.
01:11So then you would, one person would come in with one idea of like what the hair might look like
01:15and it would be like, no, I think it needs to be more like this.
01:18And everyone would have a different version of what that tail needed to look like.