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Mothers’ Instinct has all the elements of a rip-roaring thriller: two mega stars as its leads (Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain), a lovely sense of Hitchcockian unease straight out the gate, and a Stepford Wives aesthetic: all pillbox hats and immaculate front lawns, ripe for undoing.
What a shame then that this film, about a friendship between two 60s housewives that goes wrong after a family tragedy, turns out so hackneyed – and even, in the end, offensively regressive about women.
Hathaway and Chastain are Celine and Alice, two mothers who live a seemingly perfect life in American suburbia: the big house, the white picket fence. Their eight-year-old boys, Max and Theo, are best friends, as are they, and their husbands get along too. It’s a world of mint julep cocktails, easy pleasure, and only the occasional moment of friction over the paths not taken: a wanted but not conceived second child, for instance, or Alice’s former job as a reporter, to which her husband passive-aggressively dissuades her from returning.
But when one of the boys falls from a balcony and dies, this picture-perfect existence disintegrates fast in a whirlwind of distrust. Could one or both mothers have done more to prevent it? Is the bereaved party now determined to exact revenge or is that just paranoia kicking in, helped along, naturally, by a good old dose of 60s misogyny? “I should have you committed again,” declares one husband, as his wife tries to articulate her grief and fear.
Director Benoît Delhomme deploys enjoyably familiar tropes that alert us to impending disaster: the face-on camera angle as an obliviously cheery Celine drives the kids home from school; the ice-cold platinum blonde, suspicious of her brunette rival. Hathaway and Chastain are good, particularly Chastain, who plays Alice with a heady mixture of strength and anxiety from the start.
But the script is threadbare, relying heavily on stereotypes that it actually never really gets round to properly subverting.
In the book it’s based on, Behind the Hatred by Barbara Abel, the death occurs halfway through rather than at the beginning, which perhaps goes some way to explaining why the film feels stripped of nuance.
The sexist threat of banishing a worried wife to the madhouse isn’t really explored. Nor is the possibility of a housewife returning to work.
Instead, there’s an all-too-neat inversion of who the unhappy couple is, and the societal pressures that ought to weigh heavily on these women quickly feel ancillary to the cheaper thrills of watching two mums brawl. The finale is predictable rather than shocking.
Is this really a howl of rage at the patriarchy? In the end, it felt to me more like a leaden psychological thriller, riven with clichés about women’s tendencies towards hysteria and jealousy, even though it claimed to probe them.
