A-listers descend into eye-rolling nonsense
ANNE HATHAWAY and Jessica Chastain are A-list movie stars whose talent and heft make Mothers’ Instinct (15, 94 mins, HHIII) just about worth seeing, even as it descends into a riot of melodramatic nonsense.
Benoit Delhomme’s film, a remake of a Belgian thriller, is set in affluent New Jersey suburbia in the early 1960s. The period detail is one of the film’s pleasures, not that we haven’t seen those pill-box hats and automobile fins a thousand times before both in the cinema and on TV, in shows such as Mad Men.
This film could be called Mad Women. Celine (Hathaway) and Alice (Chastain) are neighbours and apparently devoted friends, both with sons of the same age, who are also best buddies. But in the wake of a terrible domestic tragedy the hairline cracks in the women’s relationship are ripped open.
If you’ve seen the brilliant Anatomy Of A Fall you might be reminded of it, because there’s a fatal plummet here too, as well as a courtroom. But Mothers’ Instinct (and what a clunkily prosaic title, by the way) strives more to emulate Alfred Hitchcock and Patricia Highsmith, neither of whom would have allowed their stories to degenerate in quite such an eye-rolling way, as Chastain and Hathaway give full vent to their inner Bette Davis and Joan Crawford.
Silver Haze (15, 102 mins, HHHII) is also about two women but it contains no movie stars and definitely no glamour. It’s the downbeat tale of an Essex nurse, Franky (the excellent Vicky Knight), still traumatised by a childhood accident, who gets a rare shot at happiness when she falls in love with a female patient (Esme Creed-Miles, also terrific).
The writer-director, Dutch auteur Sacha Polak, based the story partly on Knight’s actual girlhood experience of being badly burned in an arson attack, adding a further layer of poignancy to a film that, for all its grimness, never (unlike Mothers’ Instinct) loses its grip.