I can see the appeal in the source material (I believe it was a novel) and the allegorical elements about how being a new – virtually single – mother makes you feel like just an automaton in service to another human and disconnects you from the animal and primal.

I'm not sure if the book did a better job of connecting or conveying that allegory, but even though the movie has some interesting ideas, they exist somewhat in isolation and it doesn't altogether match everything up.

The unnamed protagonist (Amy Adams) has a preschool-aged boy with her loving but mostly absent husband (Scoot McNairy). She used to be an artist but has put it all on hold for motherhood, and now – even though she chose this – she resents the loss of her identity, former self and isolation, her only company other mothers whose concerns she finds kind of vacuous.

She experiences ever-more elaborate fantasies about lashing out aggressively against her environment and the life she now feels stuck in, but it's more than that as she starts sprouting hair in weird places, grows extra nipples and feels like her senses are heightened.

You're never sure if her fractured psyche is concocting an elaborate fantasy so the rage in her subconscious has an outlet, but the physical signs all point to an inescapable truth – she's gradually turning into a dog.

It seems particularly the case when the neighbourhood pooches all start showing up at night to scratch at the doors of her house, leaving offerings from their hunt on the doorstep in the form of an array of dead prey animals.

Though it's initially scary, she eventually embraces it, taking to having her son sleep in a dog bed at the end of her bedroom, which he does very happily, breaking the habit of not being able to sleep until he's in bed with her every night. They eat out of dog bowls and play increasingly intense games pretending to be dogs, all of which bring much-needed healing to her soul as she reconnects with something she's been missing.

It's all got to do with her upbringing in an isolated and strictly religious community that looks slightly Amish. During flashbacks to her girlhood, we see her similarly repressed mother, and she starts to realise the older woman experienced the strange changes and powers she herself now feels.

The entire story until that point is really just one big parable of the theme – no real advancement in the plot comes until she confronts her husband about what's been going on (and he does her about her increasingly erratic behaviour).

So it all ends with questions – is the whole dog thing just a fantasy to her? To us as the audience? Can You Ever Forgive Me? director Marielle Heller, who writes and directs here, isn't as interested in resolving those questions as she is in drawing the parallels and leaving you to think about them.

It's a worthy goal, it just needs to take what it had in the mixing pot and blend it all together a little more smoothly.