Mothers' Instinct is a blunt pencil of a movie.
It has definitely got two mothers in it, so be careful to put the apostrophe in the right place. I am not quite sure which of them is supposed to be showing eponymous amounts of instinct.
It all happens in the late 1950s. In a wry and surprising twist, it turns out that the outwardly perfect lives of a pair of middle class suburban neighbours disguise psychological hang-ups, anxieties and even paranoia. They do not, happily, turn out to be living in a virtual reality simulation, but I might have found it more convincing if they had.
Alice (Jessica Chastain) and Celine (Anne Hathaway) each have a young son, Theo and Max, respectively. They are the best of friends and sing annoying songs in the back seats of cars, making it impossible not to think of Rod and Tod Flanders. The annoying song keeps cropping up in the sound track, but happily not as much as it does in the trailer. In the opening minutes of the movie, Max falls from an upstairs balcony (while trying to hang a nesting box on a tree) and is tragically killed.
It's all very intense and melodramatic. Everyone seems to walk around in a trance, possibly due to the quantity of cocktails they consume, and director Benoit Delhomme clearly loves Hitchcock very much indeed. The first act appears to be setting up the story of the psychological ramifications of a terrible tragedy. Celine blames herself for Max's death, and understandably starts to treat Theo as a sort of substitute. Theo's mother, Alice, is understandably uncomfortable with this. There is an overwrought funeral scene in which Celine puts one of Theo's toys in Max's open casket. Later, she allows Theo onto the balcony which Max fell from; and leaves peanut cookies lying around even though Theo is known to have a serious nut allergy. Theo himself threatens to throw himself off the balcony so he can be with his friend and the angels, and much hugging and apologising ensues.
So: has Celine been driven crazy by her loss; or is Alice reading too much into perfectly innocent actions? Is Alice paranoid, or is Celine malevolent? Who, precisely, is gaslighting whom? For about fourty four minutes it is all mildly interesting, and you can't fault the interior design, the cocktail snacks, or the acting. I think I've seen the sinister-knowing-wise-child motif as many times as I want to, I have to say. But at the half-way point, all is revealed in a twist of Saltburnian unconvincingness, and we are faced with another three quarters of an hour of what has basically become a low key suburban horror movie.
I didn't buy the ending at all. It appears that the movie is adapted from a French movie which was itself adapted from a French novel. I would place a small bet on the source material having started where the current film ends -- with at least several of the characters seemingly living happily ever after -- and then revealed the horrible sequence of events that resulted in this idyllic conclusion in flashbacks.
In which case the message would still be that beneath apparently happy very late 1950s domesticity there can lurk unspoken shame, horror and secrets. A theme which I do not feel is quite in the first flush of youth.
A diverting ninety minutes in the cinema, but deeply unsatisfying. Since you asked, I have never in fact seen a lassie going in either direction.
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