Review: Mothers’ Instinct

Director:  Benoît Delhomme

Stars:  Anne Hathaway, Anders Danielsen Lie, Jessica Chastain

Benoît Delhomme does double duty here. The French cinematographer has a handsome repertoire, having worked with the likes of Tsai Ming-liang, Lone Scherfig, John Hilcoat and James Marsh (to name but a few), bringing understated elegance to a wealth of pictures. Mothers’ Instinct sees him take the directing chair for the first time, but he’s clearly loathe to give up his former territory, retaining DoP duties, too. The film is an American remake of Olivier Masset-Depasse’s 2018 effort, both loosely adapted from a novel by Barbara Abel.

Delhomme switches up the locale from ’60s Brussels to ’60s America (possibly upstate New York, possibly California; it’s such a bottle movie that pin-pointing becomes pointless), peering through the manicured foliage of affluent suburbia to investigate the traumas and torments of two housewives; neighbours in a battle of wills over their beloved sons. Alice (Jessica Chastain) is a highly-strung mother, prone to protectiveness and spells of anxiety. When she spots Celine’s (Anna Hathaway) boy Max (Baylen D. Bielitz) playing precariously on a high balcony she rushes to his aid, but she’s too late. Tragedy strikes, and the box opens on Alice’s descent into paranoia and suspicion that Celine might be targeting her own son Theo (Eamon Patrick O’Connell) for some dark form of retribution.

Mothers’ Instinct arrives shackled by two curses. One is the still-fresh memory of Todd Haynes’ deliciously sour melodrama May December, which pitted Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman against one another in an entirely more twisted and witty Mother-Off. The other curse is a very well-cut trailer, which uses the sing-song melody of “Did You Ever See A Lassie?” (nominally featured in the film itself) to promote the feeling that Mothers’ Instinct might exist in the same sphere of decadent high-wire camp that crackled around Haynes’ film.

But those suggestions – those tacit promises – are written on the wind. It doesn’t. It’s nowhere near.

Delhomme attacks the material stiffly and sincerely, often deliberately steering away from the over-the-top Sirkian mood swells inherent to the (really very silly) material. The production looks handsome enough. It has that Mad Men-esque cleanliness, presenting a ’60s suburbia of immaculate surfaces and pristine pastel dresses. Chastain and Hathaway are powerhouses – two of cinema’s own Mothers – who have shared credits on films before but never shared scenes. The set-up of Mothers’ Instinct very much teases a series of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? pyrotechnics, but no such exuberance exists. The pastels are muted and the music doesn’t swell. Both his Mothers are on fire, but the rooms they inhabit lack warmth. There are awkwardly pocked cold spaces between them, as though their scenes were actually shot separately. The sparks are missing. Mothers’ Instinct is sterile. Inert.

It’s a shame, because there’s plenty of potential here for something wry and ironic, but the muted earnestness kills the picture. When it’s funny, it’s exasperatingly funny. So many scenes end with Chastain’s Alice hurtling out a door to rescue someone. The film is very much from her point of view. As such Chastain gets to throw a feebly-comic wobbly every 5 minutes while Hathaway waves from balconies or stalks mournfully through the shadows.

Operating at a soporific trudge and deeply in need of a sense of humour, what unfurls simply fails to hold water. The machinations of the plot – once revealed – don’t make a lick of sense, requiring the audience to make leaps of logic that feel counterintuitive. The husbands feel like an absolute mystery, particularly Celine’s. How did she end up with Josh Charles’ drunken sadsack? Anders Danielsen Lie fairs a little better as Alice’s other half, but they’re shadows in the story, one that takes malcontent suburban malaise and tugs a bizarre, calculated jealousy out of it. The end fails to satisfy. It doesn’t feel wicked, or clever, just preposterous and convenient. Perhaps most bafflingly of all, Delhomme willingly loses control of the camera for an ill-fitting final shot at odds with the entirety of the picture that preceded it.

It’s poor film journalism to chastise something for what it could’ve been rather than what it is. But Mothers’ Instinct is so, so little. Bringing Hathaway and Chastain together is such a juicy prospect, but its stifled at every turn. Individually they’re both fine, particularly Hathaway, but to make something this – I’m sorry – stupid fly, you really need to show more nerve than Delhomme musters here.

A thriller that doesn’t thrill. Melodrama with no melody. And little in the way of deeper resonance for the time period. At it’s worst, Mothers’ Instinct seems to embrace the era’s crude stereotypes, particularly regarding infertility and mental health. Better watch out for those broken nutcases.

A pity.