Rarely has a NEON film so thoroughly lived up to the colorless and inert nature of the studio namesake as does Mothers’ Instinct, the directorial debut of DP Benoît Delhomme. Anyone paying attention to the summer cinema landscape shouldn’t exactly be surprised, buried as the film was as ostensible counterprogramming but absent even a whisper of a marketing campaign — as red a flag as their is for a would-be psycho-thriller starring Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain. A remake of Olivier Masset-Depasse’s 2018 film of the same name, itself an adaptation of Barbara Abel’s novel… of the same name, Mothers’ Instinct follows the cascading miseries visited upon a pair of housewife neighbors in 1960s’ Suburb, USA.
Alice (Chastain) and Céline (Hathaway) are friends who each have one son — Theo and Max, respectively. There are also husbands in the picture — Simon (Anders Danielsen Lie) is married to Alice, Damian (Josh Charles) to Céline — though their roles are so incidental to what transpires that they are hardly worth mentioning. The film opens with the two households sharing evening cocktails, and ends with Simon’s offhand remark about how easy it was for him and Alice to have Theo, thoughtless because it was nearly impossible for the other couple to conceive at all. Cut to the next day: Max stays home sick from school, and when Alice sees him on his bedroom balcony attempting to hang a bird feeder in a nearby tree, incautious in the way most kids are, she panics and attempts to alert Céline. Failing to do so via hoots and hollers, she tries to crawl through a shared hedge that the boys use as a shortcut between yards, fails at that as well, and takes the long way around to the front door, where we discover Céline has been unable to hear the commotion due to the ‘60s vacuum’s decibel level. By the time the two mothers make it upstairs, Max has fallen to his death.
If this particular accounting of synopsis reads as glib, it’s because every moment from the opening of Mothers’ Instinct is designed to elicit maximum tensional impact in the most rote ways possible. At barely 90 minutes, the film is nothing but incident, leaving no room for its intended ambiguity or anxiety to breathe and expand and fill the frames. Alice, riddled with guilt for failing to prevent Max’s death, is quickly turned by the film into a possible paranoiac, suspecting her grieving neighbor of nefarious motivations, while Hathaway plays Céline as a see-saw of clinical detachment and earnest grief. In this push-pull interplay, Delhomme overclocks his film so conspicuously that viewers are quickly conditioned to expect rug-pulls the moment calm descends, which works only to rob the film of genuine suspense or surprise. In this way, Mothers’ Instinct can often feel lifted from the earlier era of late-’80s/early-’90s domestic thrillers, but flattened to the point of feeling more like the Lifetime version of those movies. And there is no deviating from this basic mode until the film’s ultimate reveal in its final few minutes — just 80+ minutes of volleying the accusation of crazy back and forth.
It’s all enough to make it truly difficult to understand what drew these actors to the project — given the pedigree, this is clearly not the movie they thought they were making. Lie and Charles, two actors who have demonstrated pronounced skill with projecting complicated interiority, have absolutely nothing to do; the former is left to fill the role of mid-century husband dismissing his wife’s anxieties as mere hysteria — an idea only hat-tipped at and not explored in any real way — while Charles mostly disappears after the first 15 minutes, only to return to serve as plot fodder. There’s the hint of grand melodrama to the project, but this too is undone by a failure to establish the necessarily rich emotional textures the genre demands, an evident impatience to reach the clipped conclusion, and the sense that these women are mere stock types playing out an overly familiar thriller of suburban ennui. Delhomme surprisingly fails to even lend the film any compensatory aesthetic dimension, demonstrating nothing of the dynamic visual work he delivered in the likes of Artemisia, The Proposition, or Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s recent version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, instead offering only cold, gray compositions and medium-close interior shots — perhaps thematically befitting the material, but narcotizing in execution. All viewers are left with, then, is a film that feels like little more than an especially poor facsimile of precedents, bled dry of both the psychological spectacle of high drama and the slick style of a thriller. Instead, we’re left to simply watch Mothers’ Instinct swirl its tea for 90 minutes, before sloshing it out with a shrug.
DIRECTOR: Benoît Delhomme; CAST: Jessica Chastain, Anne Hathaway, Anders Danielsen Lie, Josh Charles; DISTRIBUTOR: NEON; IN THEATERS: July 26; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 34 min.
