Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain as desperate housewives locked in a duel that simmers with sad-girl glamour? Go ahead, just try not to say “mother” for 94 minutes, as the old viral challenge went. There’s certainly a lot to like in Mothers’ Instinct, a glossy psychological thriller that unravels against the changing landscape of suburban America at the dawn of the 60s. Hathaway sulks and schemes in black-widow gloves and a Jackie Kennedy bob; Chastain trembles on the cusp of a meltdown, her ginger locks scorched a Hitchcock blonde that practically screams Lifetime original movie. There’s grief, poisoning, a meddling mother-in-law — the perfect recipe for a ripe melodrama of the macabre. If only the movie had the courage of its camp convictions. Adapted from the 2018 French film of the same name (itself based on a 2012 novel), Mothers’ Instinct stars Hathaway as Céline, an upper-middle-class suburban housewife with a prosperous husband (Josh Charles; yes, the guy from ‘Fortnight’) and a young son, Max (Baylen D. Bielitz). Her next-door neighbour, Alice (Chastain), is almost a mirror version: She’s likewise married to a pencil-pushing suit (Anders Danielsen Lie), and has a primary-school-aged boy, Theo (Eamon O’Connell), with whom Max is friends. In what may come as a surprise to anyone who’s never seen a movie set in ye olde suburban America, things are hardly idyllic for either woman. Céline’s inability to conceive another child is thawing her marriage. Alice wants to return to the workforce, a notion that her husband rejects. There might be a progressive president on the way in JFK, and a race to put men on the moon, but women are expected to carry on being happy homemakers. You can hardly blame them for going a little crazy. “Is it enough for you, this life?” Alice asks Céline, in one of those tender moments that suggest a kinship forged in the face of male neglect. Then, tragedy. While Céline is distracted with housework, Max teeters on the edge of a third-storey balcony — and Alice, who clocks the situation from afar, is too late to prevent the boy from plummeting to his death. (Luckily, no steel drum 50 Cent covers were harmed in the fall.) Spiralling into a black hole of grief, Céline secretly blames Alice for the accident, and draws closer to Theo, smothering him as a substitute for her own son. If you can already guess where all of this is going, then you’re well ahead of what director Benoît Delhomme and screenwriter Sarah Conradt give the audience credit for — though the film’s predictably soapy twists and turns aren’t the problem. Idling in a low gear for much of its run time, Mothers’ Instinct is a muted thriller that doesn’t play to the material’s inherent strengths. Rather than ramp up the pulpy fun of the story, the movie is gratingly tasteful — a mid-century melodrama reconfigured as over-lit, piano-soaked streaming filler, all empty spaces and digital sheen. The film’s lacklustre look is odd, considering first-time feature director Delhomme’s substantial body of work as a cinematographer — a resume that includes films with both Hathaway (One Day) and Chastain (Lawless). The French filmmaker clearly knows how to frame his stars, but his dramatic direction — and his ability to work the movie’s emotional register — is another matter. You can see Hathaway and Chastain — Oscar winners for their respective grandstanding in Les Misérables and The Eyes of Tammy Faye — itching to open up the throttle, even as the film refuses let to them relish its cliches. True, Chastain does get some mileage out of Alice’s escalating paranoia, as her anxiety over her own inadequacy as a mother curdles into fear and mistrust. And Hathaway gives Céline a cool, inscrutable edge; watching her dark, down-turned eyes, it’s impossible to tell where the grief ends and the plotting begins. (Between this and her role in the Ottessa Moshfegh adaptation Eileen, the resurgent star is developing quite the taste for rebellious 60s women.) At the same time, neither actor can quite lock onto the other’s wavelength, an issue that appears to stem from Delhomme’s uncertainty as to how to play the tone. With its dark subject matter and air of domestic oppression, Mothers’ Instinct obviously has its eye on Hitchcock and Highsmith, with a dash of Douglas Sirk’s ravishing technicolour melodrama. But it has little sense of the disreputable, or the willingness — even with an admirably twisted finale — to let the material get sufficiently dark and unhinged. In an era where adult-focused studio movies have all but vanished from the multiplex — and where Hollywood actresses in their 40s remain under-served — you can understand what might have drawn Hathaway and Chastain (who both serve as producers) to the project. Still, they both deserve better than this streaming purgatory. Somebody get these two into a Todd Haynes movie, and fast. Mothers’ Instinct is streaming on Prime Video.
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