Mother’s Instinct – Film Review
by David Turpin

Director – Benoît Delhomme
Writers – Barbara Abel, Sarah Conradt
Stars – Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Josh Charles

It’s the early 1960s in an affluent American suburb.  Alice (Jessica Chastain) and Celine (Anne Hathaway) are neighbours.  Each is mother to an apple-cheeked little boy, and wife to a sketchily characterised husband.  They have a sisterly bond that presumably sustains them through the doldrums and travails of suburban life.  Fate, however, intervenes in the form of a terrible accident involving a hand-made birdhouse, and soon Alice and Celine find themselves mired in suspicion, paranoia, and worse.

That’s right, Mother’s Instinct (remade from a similarly titled 2015 French film) is an old-fashioned curtain-twitcher of the kind we just don’t see anymore — and certainly not on the big screen.  That alone is reason enough to find it oddly cherishable, even if it never comes together quite as it should.

The snag is something to do with the performances.  Neither Chastain nor Hathaway is bad in the film — far from it — but they never seem to be singing from quite the same hymn sheet.  As we saw in last year’s lumpy but enthralling Eileen, Hathaway has found her niche by leaning into the sinister side of camp.  It serves her particularly well here in a scene where she swoons at a school event while wearing full Jackie Kennedy regalia, and a sequence where she meaningfully puts on and takes off several pairs of gloves.  Always a more sincere performer, Chastain plays things straighter.  That’s a valid choice too and the film — co-produced by her own company, Freckle Films — clearly means much to her.  But when throwing a parcel at a door while howling ‘Keep your poisoned gifts!’ or brandishing a bronze Venus De Milo in a fight scene, naturalism is a big ask.

It all looks cosmetically beautiful.  Debuting director Benoît Delhomme has a long and illustrious career as a cinematographer — including ravishing work for Tran Anh Hung and Julian Schnabel — and it shows in the gauzy loveliness of the film’s surface.  Costume designer Mitchell Travers also has a rare old time, although putting Chastain in a sky-blue-and-mustard floral jumpsuit to sneak into a forbidden basement is perhaps an indulgence too far.

Still, true camp depends on determination of tone: either perfect knowingness (as in, say, the collected works of Charles Busch); or an earnestness so wrong-headed it touches the divine (the film version of Valley of the Dolls).  Mother’s Instinct has a little bit of both, with a string of incidental pleasures, but little aftertaste.  And that’s okay for a rainy afternoon.  All you really need to know is that, yes, a significant pearl necklace is introduced in the first scene and, yes, said pearl necklace is dramatically snapped about eighty minutes later.  On a baseline level, this correspondent left satisfied.