In fact, some people criticised this film for shying away from the body horror at the heart of Mother's animalistic breakdown. But there is a powerful whiff of catharsis in this low-key transformation scene: watching Adams sniff the midnight air, dig with bare hands into her own tidy suburban lawn, down on her paws, fully dog in body and mind, before the hair begins to bristle on her forearms.
Adams's eerily calm voiceover (I have one thought: I am an animal), follows the rippling fur as her character is reborn as a galloping red husky, with a cloud of strawberry-blond hair on a muscular frame.
One of the trickiest aspects of sports movies is the win/loss binary: how can you construct something thrilling or unexpected without forcing the outcome of a fictional match into a familiar shape?
When the tie-breaking match begins, Art has just learned, through an elegantly silent callback to earlier in the movie, that Patrick and Tashi have recently slept together. In other words, it's on.
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