Cast two eminent Hollywood actresses in a stormy psychological drama, and — especially if the setting is mid-20th century — you inevitably invoke the imperious spirits of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Mothers’ Instinct is indeed so Crawfordian in its febrility that it might have been called Mommies Dearest . But while Anne Hathaway’s dark eyes here often convey something of Crawford’s deranged intensity, Jessica Chastain — barely recognisable as a blonde — recalls not Davis but the chilly poise of Hitchcock’s muse Tippi Hedren.
Based on a 2018 Belgian film, Olivier Masset-Depasse’s Duelles , and directed by French cinematographer Benoît Delhomme, Mothers’ Instinct is a curious hybrid — like a Douglas Sirk melodrama with an infusion of 1980s/90s “home invasion” thriller. At once highly controlled and downright frenzied — its heroines slalom between the two modes — Mothers’ Instinct is about two suburban homemakers in JFK-era America.
Celine (Hathaway) and Alice (Chastain) are neighbours and inseparable pals, as are their young sons. Then one boy dies tragically — and his grieving mother puts up a seemingly impenetrable barrier against her friend. Eventually, the wounds seem to heal — but the psychological warfare has only just begun.
I tread carefully in not specifying which woman is bereaved: the film deals its cards sharply enough that you don’t want to spoil its surprises. But the best surprises come from the acting, especially the way Chastain and Hathaway change directions when least expected. It is an adeptly choreographed duet that makes you unsure which character to identify with at any given moment — or which represents more of a threat to the other.
Surprisingly, it is Chastain — often associated with a glassy reserve, as in the recent Memory — who from the start pushes herself into the higher registers of frenzy, while Hathaway here maintains a more enigmatic composure. It might be possible to read the film as misogynistic, a defaming fantasy of matriarchal craziness. But female excess of an often lethal kind was integral to classic Hollywood melodrama; and here are two ferociously commanding women leading an essentially all-female movie, the husbands taking a definite back seat (they are economically sketched by Josh Charles and Anders Danielsen Lie, the latter giving something of a masterclass in amiably lukewarm nebbishry).
Admittedly, Mothers’ Instinct sets up shop in much-mapped territory: the 1960s suburban bubble, with accompanying pastel imagery and sometimes awkwardly underlined allusions to period prejudice, which we know so well from Mad Men and Revolutionary Road. But the pastiche is carried through with consistency and grace. Acting as his own cinematographer, Delhomme makes the most of Russell Barnes’s designs for this cosily claustrophobic microclimate, from the hedged entrapment of back lawns to the interiors, with their looming ceilings and ominous stairwells.
This is a film unlikely to find much love in the mainstream — the feelings invoked are so discomforting, so wildly out of kilter with Hollywood’s current emotional palette. Mothers’ Instinct is too contrived to be entirely successful, yet it is a bracing anomaly — a headily, heavily scented hothouse bloom of a movie.
★★★★☆
In UK cinemas now