Summary and review of Mothers’ Instinct: A ’60s-set psychodrama about a pair of suburban housewives whose friendship goes haywire — and then some — after one of their children dies in a freak accident, the misconceived but morbidly entertaining “Mothers’ Instinct” is far too slapdash to respect the seriousness of its premise, but at the same time also far too serious to indulge in the campiness of its plot. The result is a movie that’s a little fucked up, a little fun, and mostly just very, very sad in a way that it doesn’t have the heart to explore.
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Summary and review of Mothers’ Instinct
Summary and review of Mothers’ Instinct: Alice is the fragile one, at least at first. A crumbling eggshell of a woman who’s just been glued back together by the most discrete male psychiatrists in all of Mayberry, she can hardly make breakfast for her seven- or eight-year-old son Theo (Eamon O’Connell) without threatening to flake apart from the pressure to keep up appearances.
Summary and review of Mothers’ Instinct: Played by a skittery Jessica Chastain (who produced the project through her Freckle Films banner, and willingly assigned herself the more thankless of the two lead roles), Alice frets over Theo’s every move as if she’s just waiting for something to shatter her domestic idyll all over again; as if she can sense that Theo’s severe peanut allergy is a glaringly obvious harbinger of what’s to come.
Not even the fact that she’s married to “The Worst Person in the World” star Anders Danielsen Lie seems to loosen the knot of her Kim Novak bun — quite the opposite, in fact, even if casting the Norwegian heartthrob as an unaccented Ken Cosgrove wannabe deepens the impression of a family that’s trying to perform some version of apple pie Americana. How telling that Alice doesn’t know how to bake.
Summary and review of Mothers’ Instinct: Their next-door neighbor Céline (Anne Hathaway, also a producer) has a much breezier air about her — she’s a lush and unruly cerulean to Alice’s strict uniform of emerald green.
It was hard for Céline to become a mother, and even harder for her to learn that she’ll never be able to give birth again, but she parents her Max (Baylen D. Bielitz) with a lightness that suggests she’d rather bask in her blessings than hold onto them too tight, a mindset that seems to jibe well enough with her pharmacist husband (Josh Charles as Damian).
Alas, that dynamic changes in the blink of an eye when Max falls to his death from the balcony of their house, a tragedy that Alice spots in time to scream about but not soon enough to stop.
Suddenly Céline has become the broken one, a reversal that invites Alice’s neuroses to feast on her guilt and fret over her child now that her best friend no longer has one.
Summary and review of Mothers’ Instinct: Needless to say, the situation gets a whole lot stickier when Céline and Theo begin to bond over their shared grief, and stickier still when the social discomfort of it all starts giving way to more death.
Summary and review of Mothers’ Instinct: Kooky as things get, none of those developments come as a surprise in a suffocatingly written movie that introduces every character detail with a hammer click of Chekhov’s gun (the script is credited to Sarah Conradt).
Sorry, but you can have a kid who can’t eat peanuts or a catty mother-in-law (Caroline Lagerfelt) who can’t go a day without her heart medication; real life might allow for both, but it’s hard to say the same for a glibly demented 94-minute soap opera about the social repercussions of child death.
I suspect this wasn’t as much of a sticking point in Barbara Abel’s “Behind the Hatred,” or in the award-winning Belgian thriller Olivier Masset-Depasse adapted from that novel in 2018, but this telling of the story is far too airless to strike a consistent balance between gilded trash and genuine trauma. Where “May December” made it look easy, “Mothers’ Instinct” makes it seem almost impossible.
Summary and review of Mothers’ Instinct: It often seems as if first-time director Benoît Delhomme shares Alice’s fixation with the surface of things.
A gifted cinematographer who was originally hired to shoot this movie (only to assume double duty after Masset-Depasse backed out during pre-production), Delhomme has recently pivoted away from the hyper-vivid experimentalism that made him famous (“The Scent of Green Papaya,” Mike Figgis’ “Miss Julie”) in favor of working on sumptuous prestige dramas like “The Theory of Everything” and “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”
Summary and review of Mothers’ Instinct: Though “Mothers’ Instinct” is painted on a much smaller canvas than either of those films, its attention to the ombre shadows of Céline’s living room — and to the fluorescent sterility of the scenes where Alice’s suspicion takes hold — allows this lower-budget lark to look similarly larger than life, to the point that Anne Nikitin’s Herrmann-esque score often feels like a hat on a hat.
By this point, however, it’s no secret that white bread suburbia can disguise all sorts of sociopathic derangement, and neither Delhomme nor the script he’s been handed display any meaningful interest in the underlying conditions that find Alice and Céline at each others’ throats.
Summary and review of Mothers’ Instinct: Alice’s vague history of mental illness — and how desperate she is to prove that it’s behind her — should be a rich backdrop for the way that she responds to Max’s death, especially as her fears that Céline might resent her begin to spiral into paranoid suspicions of murder.
But “Mothers’ Instinct” is too uncomfortable with the gravity of Céline’s loss to see the situation clearly. Like Alice, the film is eager to fashion Celine’s tragedy into its own cross to bear, and like Alice, the film suffers for that self-interest as it veers into melodramatic silliness.
Summary and review of Mothers’ Instinct: The real tragedy of this story is that Alice is both a victim — and an unwitting perpetrator — of a society that has fatally stigmatized female pain, and the real tragedy of Delhomme’s telling is that it falls into a similar trap, with the film’s shallow focus on schlock-like suspense cheating towards “hysteria” before either of its housewives are given the chance to subvert it.
Summary and review of Mothers’ Instinct: It helps that Hathaway is rivetingly dangerous as a woman who’s capable of nothing and anything all at once, and that “Mothers’ Instinct” inherited an ending that — at long last — allows it to square the raw emotionality of its characters with the daytime TV luridness of their situation, but that pitch-perfect finale only serves to reinforce how the rest of this movie struggles to articulate the profound sadness that undergirds even its frothiest moments.
