Dog mom: "Nightbitch"

Marielle Heller's adaptation of the Rachel Yoder novel Nightbitch alights upon a bold opening gambit: an apparently straightforward scene of supermarket conversation wherein, told by a friend how wonderful it must be to be spending so much time at home with her son, an artist played by a newly mumsy Amy Adams launches into an increasingly fraught monologue revealing her worst thoughts and fears. An eruption in an everyday setting; ordinary interaction pushed into the realms of mania. As Heller sets about channelling the pressures of parenthood, and motherhood in particular, Nightbitch will return time and again to that same tactic. Said child drops an inherited F-bomb in the closing stages of a library Book Babies gathering, stunning the room into renewed silence. Returning home, his mother notices hair sprouting from her chin and lower back, and later additional nipples growing on her torso; soon, mama is expressing a desire to curl up on a couch or snarl at those around her. If you've read the book, you'll already know that our heroine, credited only as "Mother", is turning day by day into a dog of some variety; Yoder's thesis was that motherhood makes you feral, and leaves you wanting to run free. The movie adaptation bounds up as an odd pup, hybrid in its nature. Somewhere in its DNA is the old Disney comedy The Shaggy D.A. (remade with Tim Allen as The Shaggy Dog), albeit sheared of its reverence towards family. Equally, though, there are points where Nightbitch begins to resemble something else entirely: a Jeanne Dielmann... of the multiplexes.

Notice, for one, the repetition Heller works into the early stages of what's notionally a mainstream comedy, outlining the heroine's daily routines: the cooking and feeding and dressing and cleaning and nurturing and affirming, all the work that can take the place of a career set to maternity leave. It's funny, in this context; but it also cuts to how exhausting and numbing it must be in reality, especially when you're operating as all but a one-woman show. Heller slyly delays the arrival of the kid's father on the scene: he's played by Scoot McNairy, with his magnificently rubbery, slappable face, as a man who's taken altogether blithely to this parenting lark, in large part because he gets off scot free when he leaves for the office every morning. Yet that clears more space for Nightbitch's primary selling point: one of the best comic actors of her age, doing a very solid job in a role that asks a lot of her (and finally, maybe, too much). Adams gamely undergoes the deglamorising physical transformation, and is terrific in her scenes with the kid (Heller makes her subtlest point by casting relative sweethearts - twins Arleigh and Emmett Snowden - in the latter role); she's a conduit for the very specific, blackly funny tone her director is going for - reassuring new mothers and male viewers alike that it's okay to laugh at some of this - but she also, occasionally, seems to summon a wild maternal rage. When the light goes out of her eyes, she's terrifying, and we know someone's in trouble. Heller has other weapons at her disposal: a judiciously stocked supporting cast, two or three of the finest cuts of the year, deployed to underline a point or simply slap us out of any complacency. But it's around Adams that Nightbitch feels strongest, most confident and most coherent.

That coherence, alas, begins to wane from the halfway point. Running to a skimpy-seeming 99 minutes, the theatrical version of Nightbitch has been cut to the bone, if not ripped to shreds; possibly the thinking was that one target audience will have babysitters to relieve, but mostly it bears the look of a film that was made subject to an especially torturous test-screening process, with scenes that come and go in the blink of an eye, and strands that develop more erratically than one would like. That it shapes up as by far the least assured of Heller's films is partly down to the high bar this writer-director has set for herself (The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood), but mostly down to how, from a perilously early stage, Nightbitch suggests a film that exists in many versions, each taking different paths to get to the point where the heroine is digging with her bare hands in the back garden and chasing after squirrels. At times, Heller appears to be juggling just as much as her heroine, trying to please everyone all of the time. There are questions I don't think even this release cut finds the answers to: how literally are we meant to take this transformation? How hard does Heller want to lean into the horror of this situation? How do you make a fantasy film for adults in 2024, and how do you make a fantasy film for adults that, at every turn, is still somehow in touch with lived reality? It may well have been easier for Yoder to finesse all this working on her own on the page than it has been for Heller in the context of a studio-funded awards contender; either way, this cut is broken-backed in a way that goes far beyond describing its heroine's predicament. If I retain a certain sympathy for Nightbitch, it's because its best scenes - early on, before the test audiences grew restless - hint at a rare mainstream comedy with claws and teeth. It's been a difficult gestational period, clearly; is there a chance we'll see a director's cut in a further nine months?

Nightbitch opens in selected cinemas from Friday.

At sea: "Moana 2"

The sight of cinemas overflowing with folks of all ages as Christmas approaches is pretty cheering. It would more cheering still if so much of the business being conducted therein weren't such a grubby cashgrab. Wicked: Part 1 is one half of a movie we're being invited to pay for again in twelve months; Moana 2 turns out to be showing in 3D, which everybody bar James Cameron has long since conceded is a bill of goods, and which is especially rich given that Disney's latest was originally greenlit as a straight-to-streaming TV series. (Perhaps this is the last avenue our increasingly desperate corporate entertainments have left to them: pickpocketing.) Anyway, once you've sourced an old pair of glasses from the back of the downstairs drawer of stuff and forked over the 3D surcharge to cover all the family, you can settle back, relax and peer through greasy lenses at a dingier reprise of a film that has, in the years since 2016, staked a serious claim to being the strongest Disney animation this side of the millennium, the thinking person's Frozen. (Setting aside my outlier affection for 2000's gags-for-gags'-sake The Emperor's New Groove, I can't think of any better New Disney.) I say dingier, because even the sequences in Moana 2 that take place at high noon fall subject to 3D's perpetual dusk. (A simple experiment: drag your glasses down your nose from time to time, and notice how bright the image on screen is, compared to what you're actually watching.) Nevertheless, it's clear these animators - under the direction of Dana Ledoux Miller, Jason Hand and David G. Derrick Jr., the latter a holdover from the planned series - have been given carte blanche to push the visuals far beyond the scope of the first movie. Those once-colourful skies are now truly hallucinogenic, the prevailing idea of Pacific dreamtime only more surreal, and we tumble through worlds within worlds within worlds. Here is the best family film of the season to smuggle gummies of the non-pick-'n'-mix variety into. Here is also a pretty formidable demonstration of the power of the processor chip, its ability to convert what were originally smaller-screen imaginings into fully cinematic visions.

It's good we have such wonders to goggle at for ninety-odd minutes, because what we're listening to and trying to engage with on a narrative level proves far less impressive. The first movie sent its heroine on a life-or-death mission to expand the horizons of her people. The second merely wonders what to do with her for an hour and a half. Actually, that's a little unfair: after a half-hour of chewy exposition (something something uniting a people something), homilies about choosing who we are and endless visitations from ghosts and gods, a decision is reached to set Moana afloat anew, this time with a clutch of supporting characters, and then see what drifts into view. The script is as episodic as TV in its construction, which scans, although some of these episodes are rather enjoyable: an encounter with some unusually aggressive coconuts, a Verne-ish voyage to the bottom of the sea, a duel with cyclones. Moana 2 may actually have some of The Emperor's New Groove's devil-may-care looseness in its DNA, which is no bad thing, but too much of it feels goofy and temporary rather than mythic in any affecting and lasting way; the difference between the first film and this is that between first-wave Star Wars and the TV spinoffs being knocked out forty years on. It's great that the animation is this fluid, so a man who is also a god (with tattoos that move!) can turn first into a shark and then a bird of prey. Narratively, however, Moana 2 makes landfall as somewhere between hazy and vaporous, a light mizzle, where its predecessor was properly oceanic and engulfing. The songs are tuneful enough, though the absence of Lin-Manuel Miranda this time means there's nothing to match "How Far I'll Go", the "Defying Gravity" of 2016. Instead, we're offered echoes of past excellence - literally so when the hear-me-roar declaration "I am Moana" recurs at the climax of new song "Beyond" - and a showtune called "Get Lost" that sounds a decidedly self-reflexive note. I had reasonable fun sat before Moana 2, but - beyond a certain point - I honestly couldn't tell you what was going on, save an elevated form of doodling, a most spectacular data leak.

Moana 2 is now playing in cinemas nationwide.