Marielle Heller

Early in Nightbitch (2024), Amy Adams runs into an old colleague in a supermarket and is asked how she is finding motherhood. She says "I love it", brightly. Then Heller shows us the moment again, and this time Adams talks for two minutes about what the last two years have done to her, and then we get the bright "I love it" once more. That is the Heller method in one scene: the person in front of us is not fine, everyone in the room is pretending otherwise, and the camera stays on her face until we know the difference.

She was an actor before she was a director, and it shows. Her debut, The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015), which she also wrote, was adapted from a graphic novel. She followed it with two films built around real people, Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018) and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019), and in between directed episodes of Transparent and Casual, television that, in Transparent's case, treated each episode as a short film sharing a family. Nightbitch is her first script since her debut and the most personal thing she has made, drawn from her own years as a mother.

What she is good at is leaving a silence alone. Actors in her films are allowed to be unlikeable without the film disowning them, and they are given time. Her brother Nate Heller writes her scores, light and quiet and mostly out of the way, which suits a director who has said she likes films where the explosions happen inside someone's heart and mind instead of outside. In the first half hour of Nightbitch we laughed a great deal, at the eggs and the playground and the same bath every night, cut short and tight by Anne McCabe so the routine wears a groove; by the fourth bath we had stopped laughing, and we think Heller meant us to.

What she is less good at is following a story somewhere ugly. Nightbitch is about a woman turning into a dog, and each time the body starts to change Heller cuts away, so the fur and the tail never once frighten. Adams then reads us paragraphs of voiceover explaining what the scene has already shown. There is a softness in her endings, too, a wish for everybody to come round, that has been noticed in her work before and which Nightbitch does not shake off; the mothers from the library group go from mocked to embraced in a change of heart the film wants more than it earns.

She is a director actors should want and a writer who does not yet trust the audience to sit in the dark. If she can find a story that will not let her look away, she has everything else she needs.