Mothers' Instinct

Mothers' Instinct is a compelling thriller that elevates Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain to incredible heights. The film is a tense and terrifying story of love, loss, and deception that sees people pushed to their limits.

While the third act delivers the inevitable campy melodrama that’s the chief selling point, it’s the film leading up to it that proves most remarkable: a sincere throwback to a deeply uncool cinema seemingly unconcerned with the ridicule it’ll likely receive.

There’s an odd timidity here that borders on self-denial.

Mothers’ Instinct gets by on its pulpy potential more than anything else. There’s something intrinsically appealing about watching two phenomenal actresses go head-to-head in an old-fashioned melodrama.

While a committed Chastain and Hathaway do their utmost to inject some gravitas into proceedings there are some moments which border on the absurd, particularly as it reaches its frenzied climax. Still, there is some fun to be found in the arch campness of it all and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the film looks gorgeous.

A film about two immaculately groomed women gaslighting and goading each other to the point of madness should be a lot more fun than this.

The movie starts out very serious and shocking and concludes on a note of pure farce, though I have to say Chastain’s performance has a clenched restraint which is marginally more convincing than Hathaway’s operatic but callow displays of hurt and entitlement.

Jessica Chastain and Anne Hathaway play happy neighbors with young sons who are best friends. A tragic accident happens that results in all manner of suspicion and jealousy. When you start with an Oscar-winning twosome, you can expect some enjoyable dramatic moments and they deliver. The period production design adds an appealing visual element. This is the first directorial effort by established cinematographer Benoît Delhomme and he hasn't managed to bring much tension or real dramatic flair to this psychological thriller. The ending pushes credibility and there are other flaws, but watching Hathaway and Chastain work provides the film's true motive.

(Mauro Lanari) Remake of a 2018 Belgian work I rated 3.5 out of 10 ("''Scenes from a Siamese Marriage': a Hitchcòckian family thriller that, aiming to explore the criminal allure of the 60s bourgeoisie, is ruined with a pandemic of characters with psychiatric behavior"), I could also dismiss this directorial debut by just underlining the Botox competition between the two self-producing divas. Instead, this film provides me with an opportunity to remark a crucial point: it makes no sense to talk about toxic love as if in the history of ideas the analysis of agapelogy was concluded in the 6th century of Augustinian Neoplatonism or with the "si Deus non est, unde bonum?" first of Boethius ("De consolatione philosophiae", 524) and then of Leibniz ("Essays on Theodicy", 1710). Since then we have gained further knowledge, we have learned to distinguish the "bonum" from the "gratia" also thanks to game theory, we have new explanatory models that however do not reach writers, novelists, screenwriters, etc. Don't they update themselves by studying the new scenarios opened up by such research? Then they should not complain about not having anything original to say, show, tell.

I was expecting so much more from this movie with Ann Hathaway and Jessica Chastain but it was such a formula-driven suspense movie with the only real surprise being the twist in the end and even then it just left me saying WTF! The problem with Ann Hathaway's character Alice was that she's not consistent for such a pathological housewife. The story was driven more by theatrical set-ups than any real sense of danger, and when it finally got dangerous it did so in such an implausible way that I was left to wonder how Jessica Chastain's character Celine could be so stupid. The male characters were utterly useless. The problem was the writing. Hathaway and Chastain did their best to keep this movie afloat but not enough to save it.