Review of the movie Mothers’ Instinct

Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain play next-door neighbors in Mothers’ Instinct, a psychological retro thriller based on the 2018 Belgian film of the same name and the 2012 novel by Barbara Abel. The film offers an interesting and seemingly sophisticated plot, but as the action progresses, it begins to slow down, and at the climax, on the contrary, it becomes abruptly rough, sloppy, and eventually delivers a rough leaden denouement that does not match the elegant promises given to the viewer at the beginning.

The story is set in an idyllic American suburb in the early 1960s during the Kennedy presidency. At a birthday party, her best friend and neighbor gives an expensive pearl necklace to her best friend and neighbor. Obviously, the women are very close and behave like sisters, like Snow White and Little Red Riding Hood from the famous Grimm fairy tale. So everything looks so perfect: perfect homes, perfect mothers, perfect husbands (albeit somewhat patriarchal according to the era, as one suggests that his wife, who wants to do journalism, write for the school newspaper, and the other determines in a commanding tone how many glasses of wine – even one – a woman is allowed to drink at her own holiday), perfect children, perfect guests, perfect barbecue, perfect gifts, perfect dresses, hairstyles, earrings, makeup, perfect garden and lawn, perfect movements and smiles – everything, once again, looks so perfect that it is quite obvious that this idyll will be shattered in the next or several scenes.

In fact, the episode at the party, even if it has no consequences, shows how easy it is to turn a utopia into an irreparable nightmare: The little son of one of the mothers, who is allergic to peanuts, almost eats a nutty cookie… Of course, the next incident ends differently, and the fact that the perfect formula “two mothers, two fathers, two sons” turns into the incomplete formula “two mothers, two fathers, one son” shows that a war will break out over a unit without a pair… So Maternal Instinct is not just about maternal instinct. It’s about how a mother’s fairy tale turns into a mother’s apocalypse in just one moment.

Well, it is also about instinct. It is no coincidence that the action takes place in the era of the post-war economic rise of the United States, in the conditional decade of 1950 (53) – 1960 (63), when American society, that is, American white society, was most blinded by patriarchal goodness, traditionalist welfare; when the largest baby boom in history exploded and American women almost completely turned into “Stepford wives.” In fact, motherhood was the only acceptable area of interest for women at the time, so the maternal instinct was exaggerated to the point that almost any representative of the “weaker” sex, deprived of work, profession, free hobbies (except for housekeeping and gardening), free sex… turned into a mommy maniac.

Here, by the way, the classic rule of Chekhov’s gun, which hangs on the wall in the first act, is flawlessly, albeit trite, applied here: if it hangs on the wall in the first act, it will certainly shoot in the last act. So if a friend gives her friend a status necklace made of real pearls in the first act and puts it around her neck with an accent, then in the final act this pretentious and at the same time restrained necklace, as a symbol of the “porcelain” female life of that period, must come off her neck, and the beads must fall off with or without sound, but always in close-up and slightly slow motion… Actually, the film by French director Benoît Delhomme looks like pearl beads. But if somewhere in the middle it looks like real pearls and plays a seemingly subtle psychological game with the viewer, where the main characters, like mollusks in their shells, each hide in their own shells of mutual suspicion, resentment and accusations…, in the second half the film looks more and more like a fake necklace, where instead of elegant pearls there is rough plastic covered with cheap mother-of-pearl.

It would have been better if “Maternal Instinct” had remained an understatement. It would have remained only an instinct, that is, an impulse to action, and not action itself. It would be better if feelings remained feelings, and suspicions remained suspicions, instead of so carelessly and ponderously dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, signing heroes and villains, giving physical answers to psychological questions… However, the only interesting thing about the ending is that one maternal idyll is shattered by chance, and the other by a chain of directed influence, and maternal evil defeats not only maternal goodness but also the “welfare system” built by conservative men.