Thriller about rich suburban housewives whose picture-perfect lives belie past traumas lacks the self-awareness needed to prevent it from being utterly absurd
Here is a hilariously unsubtle and increasingly ridiculous psycho-melodrama of the 1960s American suburbs starring Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain. Some kind of cult status must be on the way, with emote-along midnight screenings, and maybe a new Catfight of the Year Oscar has to be brought in to reward it.
Mothers’ Instinct is written by Sarah Conradt and directed and shot by celebrated cinematographer Benoît Delhomme making his feature debut; it is partly based on the 2012 French-language thriller Derrière la haine (Behind the Hate) by Barbara Abel, and partly on a 2018 Belgian movie adaptation. Hathaway and Chastain play Celine and Alice respectively, two prosperous stay-at-home housewives giving it the full Betty Draper feminine mystique: they are friends with matching picture-perfect lives, each with an adored nine-year-old son, each with a sturdy commuter husband (played respectively by Josh Charles and Anders Danielsen Lie) and each with an awful buried trauma. But when tragedy strikes, it unlocks irrational suspicion and vengeful obsession.
