Mothers raise the bar in creepy 60s thriller

Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain play American housewives divided by an unthinkable tragedy in this stylish period thriller, writes Paul Whitington

Mothers’ Instinct (15A, 94mins) ★★★

There’s a touch of the Douglas Sirks about Mothers’ Instinct, a glossy, goosebumpy thriller set in a plush 1960s American suburb. On the face of it, life is pretty sweet for best friends and neighbours Alice (Jessica Chastain) and Celine (Anne Hathaway).

They’re both happily married to high-earning husbands and their young sons Theo (Eamon Patrick O’Connell) and Max (Baylen D Bielitz) are inseparable friends. So much so, they’ve cut a little tunnel in the border hedge so they can come and go from each other’s houses.

But there are tensions amid all this apparent perfection. Alice wants to go back to work, but her husband Simon (Anders Danielsen Lie) is not sure she’s up to it: there are hints of mental instability or some sort of nervous condition.

Celine’s husband Damian (Josh Charles) works a lot and is not always as present in his child’s life as he should be. But overall, things aren’t too bad and over boozy dinner parties, the two couples celebrate their good fortune.

All of that changes though, courtesy of a horrific accident. Max is playing up on the first-floor balcony when he slips and falls to his death. Alice had seen him from her garden and called to him to be careful, but wasn’t quick enough through the hedge to save him.

At the funeral, Alice senses that Celine is frosty with her, and initially puts it down to her unimaginable grief. But then, when the coolness persists, she becomes convinced that Celine blames her. Is Alice imagining all this? Her husband certainly thinks so, and refers darkly to an earlier breakdown as evidence that her senses are not to be trusted.

Unbeknownst to Alice and Simon, Celine, out of loneliness perhaps, has encouraged Theo to come into their house to play with Max’s toys. One afternoon, when Alice is in the garden again, she looks up and to her horror sees Theo standing up on the balcony ledge at the exact same spot where Max fell.

She’s through the hedge like a shot this time and persuades him to get down. From her window, Celine watches, having proof now perhaps that her neighbour could have tried harder.

Can grief of this kind loosen sanity’s foothold? It’s not hard to imagine, and Alice is now convinced that Celine is intent on acting out some sort of baroque revenge. But the more Alice talks about this to her husband, the more unhinged she herself seems.

All of this psychological ‘sturm und drang’ takes place against a picture-perfect suburban backdrop straight out of Norman Rockwell. Both women, even in extremis, dress fashionably in bold colours that tend to denote their changing moods.

In ways, both of them feel on trial in terms of their motherhood: in an era when a working wife was an affront to male pride, parenting and homemaking were, for most women, the only shows in town. What if you had no special aptitude for either? How were you supposed to feel about yourself then?

These are some of the interesting questions raised by a film that never quite becomes the sum of its parts. Mothers’ Instinct is based on a French novel by Barbara Abel and a 2018 adaptation by Olivier Masset-Depasse: he was due to direct this American version, but was replaced by Benoît Delhomme.

He does a decent job overall, without ever really exploring the story’s cinematic possibilities, and the film’s pacing is oddly flat given its racy plot.

Chastain and Hathaway, though, are superb together, pushing and pulling our sympathies between these complex, thwarted women. In expressing her character’s grief, Hathaway wisely decides that feelings as big as these are not necessarily transmissible and instead, her Celine closes up, abandoning all sentiment with terrifying speed.

Meanwhile, Chastain plays Alice like one of Alfred Hitchcock’s unfortunate heroines, who cannot persuade anyone around them that bad things will very shortly happen.

Mothers’ Instinct is worth watching for their performances alone.

Cinemas only

‘In an era when a working wife was an affront to male pride, parenting and homemaking were the only shows in town’