Maybe a new Catfight of the Year Oscar has to be brought in to reward this 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.
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.
