Mothers Instinct: Is she crazy? Is she not crazy? Who cares?

By Rob Ryan

⭐⭐

Movies like Mothers Instinct don't seem to exist anymore unless distributed on The Life Time channel or Roku, a movie where all of the preconceived notions that a character had about a certain someone turned out to be more or less true, it could be your doctor, your teacher, your therapist or in this case your next door neighbour. I enjoy movies like this despite the genre being parodied and satirised to death by this point but I still believe that under the hands of a talented and confident filmmaker you can still make something tense and effective out of this genre, too bad that this is neither any of those things.

Mothers Instinct, adapted from a 2018 danish film of the same name and adapted from a novel by Barbara Abel tells the story of two housewives, Celine (Anne Hathaway) and her best friend/neighbour Alice (Jessica Chastain) the two could not be more inseparable especially considering their sons who are the best of friends at school. One day, Max, Celine's son (Baylen D. Bielitz) ends up staying home sick from school and Alice notices him hanging by the balcony trying to retrieve his bird house, she rushes to try and rescue him but by the time she gets to him, it's too late.

As a result of the tragedy, Celine has a mental breakdown, she shuts out Alice and her husband (Andres Danielsen Lee) out of her life and she ends up getting committed to a psych ward. Now one month later Celine tries to rebuild her life and her friendship despite still being mentally unstable and her husband (Josh Charles) regressing into alcoholism. But Alice still has her doubts, especially considering that her son Theo (Eamon Patrick O'Connell) has become attached to Celine, a relationship that has become more and more reciprocal. Is this just a relationship built out of grief or are there more sinister intentions involved?

The trailers for this movie intrigued me not only because of the genre but because I felt it had the potential to ask interesting questions about the dynamics between the mother of a deceased son and the best friend of said son, as well has how us as humans choose to cope with grief and how some things can be misconstrued as something else despite not understanding the intent of someone going through a difficult time. Rather than engage with any of these things, the movie is more interested in dangling a metaphorical carrot over your head and tease you about who's more crazy, could it be the woman who's trying to rebuild her life after shutting her friends out and losing her one and only son or could it be the woman who's revealed to have crippling anxiety due to a tragic back story and is letting her paranoia get the better of her? You Decide

It doesn't help that Alice's paranoia surrounding Celine and Theo feels very unreasonable especially considering that Celine at this point is seemingly trying to rebuild her life and friendship despite still being an emotional wreck. We as an audience are given no reason at this point to be concerned about the motivations about Celine and Theo's relationship or be in doubt if Alice is loosing touch with reality or not. It just makes you think that maybe if Alice had stop dwelling on her worries then maybe things wouldn't have had to escalate to where they end up.

Also the time period feels arbitrary to the events of this movie. I guess it provides a reason for why the women stay at home all the time but beyond that, nothing. There could have been some exploration for how far methods for dealing with mental health awareness and coping with grief have come since then but the movie doesn't seem interested in exploring any of those things. This movie could have taken place in any point in time and it would have turned out no differently thematically nor narratively say for a few minor changes.

Mother's Instinct might have been more interesting had it offered a more compelling dimensions to the characters that make you feel sympathetic to both but skeptical on who's in the wrong, expanded on it's exploration of messy human emotions and maybe offered a more nuanced and non-reductive conclusion to the events on display, as it is the movie fumbles to a ludicrous, implausible and predictable conclusion and any substance that could have come from this completely evaporates. Hathaway and Chastain are both fine actors and I have no issue with their efforts her but there is only so much they can do with very tepid material.

Mothers Instinct is out in UK Cinemas now.