METAMORPHOSIS

The director Marielle Heller explores the feral side of child rearing.

- EMILY NUSSBAUM

Marielle Heller sat in a postproduction facility in lower Manhattan, looking shaken.

It was June, 2023, and for months she’d been finalizing edits on “Nightbitch,” a movie with a Kafka-adjacent premise: a former artist, struggling to adjust to life as a stay-at-home mother, discovers that she’s turning into a dog. That day in New York, things felt nearly as surreal. Forest fires in Canada had sent smoke drifting over the Northeast, flooding the air with toxic particles that tinted the sky the lurid orange of a traffic cone.

Heller had already been feeling off kilter, having just had to put her beloved cat, Cleo, to sleep. She’d also recently had a series of unsettling encounters with animals, including one afternoon when a squirrel invaded the Brooklyn home that she shared with her husband, the director Jorma Taccone, and their two children. (She’d cornered the frantic rodent in a bathroom, then released it into Prospect Park.) And all month she’d been having bad dreams, reflecting the anxiety of releasing a new film. In one of them, she’d shown off a picture of a wolf cub to her friends, insisting that it was a beautiful baby. “I could hear them talking behind our back, saying, like, ‘Did they think we would think that was a baby? We know that’s a wolf !’ And I was, like”—she did a goofy imitation of herself, her voice querulous—“ ‘Jorma, no one thinks our joke is funny.’”