Review ‘Mother’s Instinct’: pleasure and death are close together in America’s neat suburbs

Paranoia sets in Mothers’ Instinct so prevalent that at a certain point even the most basic parts of the film come into question. Then the question arises whether neighbors Alice (Jessica Chastain) and Celine (Anne Hathaway) are actually such good friends, or whether their close bond arises from circumstances alone.

Because if you look a little further than their meticulously groomed appearances, the two look nothing alike. Alice is anxious, controlled, vigilant; Celine easy, social and relaxed. Alice is under pressure to have another child, while she would rather resume her career as a journalist. Celine wants nothing more than to have another child, but can no longer become pregnant.

For some, the role of mother is an ill-fitting costume; for the other it is so natural that when her son dies in an accident, she also loses her own identity with this loss.

Mothers’ Instinct begins with preparations for a party that is mistaken for an armed robbery. Not much later, the cookies at this party also turn out to be deadly. Pleasure and death are so close together in the tidy suburbs of America that you can easily mistake one for the other.

The film plays with that tension – although playing may not be the right word. Director Benoît Delhomme relies heavily on the emotional seriousness of the theme and thus seems to dismiss the melodramatic tendencies of the screenplay as serious. And everyone who is familiar with Belgian film Dueling lessonsof which this film is a remake, know that this is not a psychological thriller about the pitfalls of the nuclear family, but a stylish, unbelievable melodrama.

The director doesn’t seem to really fit the material, just like the two neighbors don’t really fit together either. Delhomme’s controlled visual style lends itself well to the beginning of the film, in which it is not clear what imagined danger or imagined happiness is. But the screenplay builds towards a much more exuberant finale, something that has less to do with a naturalistic unmasking of suburban appearances and more to do with a campy exaggeration of the unrest behind closed doors and high hedges.

At times it seems as if Chastain and Hathaway are also starring in two different films: the first leans on the thriller undertones of the screenplay, while the other emphasizes the ridiculousness.