Director: Marielle Heller

Stars: Any Adams, Scoot McNairy, Jessica Harper, Zoë Chao

Despite a game performance from Amy Adams, this adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s 2021 darkly comic book, a feminist portrait of motherhood with a lycanthropic edge, feels disappointingly toothless. Adams is ‘Mother’ a painter and curator who gave up her career in the city for a life of motherhood in the suburbs. Her busy husband, ‘Husband’ (McNairy) is broadly supportive but doesn’t really listen. Carting her four-year-old son around, Mother has difficultly relating to the other seemingly happy suburban mums and finds the activities mind-numbingly uninspiring. In the film’s best and pithiest sequence, she runs into an old friend who ask her how her life is, and Mother gives her a bitterly detailed and concise answer. Wanting to find out about the life changes she is undergoing, she, anachronistically, visits the local library. The wily librarian Norma (scream queen of yore Harper) gives her ‘A Field Guide to Magical Woman’, a compendium of female folklore. While reading up on the subject Mother begins to sprout hair; later she seems to attract a pack of dogs. Adams is typically fearless and goes for broke as a woman who begins to embrace her more feral self with surprising results but for a story about reverting to instincts, the picture feels way too much tell and not enough show, and the overwrought script is swamped with speechifying and didactic dialogue.

David Willoughby

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