Bad neighbours: "Mothers' Instinct"

It presents as an intriguing case study, at the very least: today's Hollywood setting aside childish things for ninety minutes to attempt the kind of so-called women's picture at which yesterday's Hollywood routinely excelled. Mothers' Instinct could scarcely be better appointed. Director Benoît Delhomme is the noted French cinematographer who's contributed to treasures of the arthouse (1993's The Scent of Green Papaya, 1995's Cyclo) and more mainstream pleasures (2007's 1408, 2014's A Most Wanted Man). Lead roles that might once have been occupied by Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland, or Kate Hepburn and Ginger Rogers, are now filled by Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain. The tried-and-tested source material is Derrière la haine, a 2012 thriller by the Belgian novelist Barbara Abel, previously filmed as 2018's Duelles by Olivier Masset-Depasse. (The writing credits on both films are identical, suggesting a quick pass through Google Translate sufficed.) Delhomme's film has unimpeachably classy mid-20th century reference points, from Vertigo to Persona; and it exists as exactly that kind of medium-budget, non-fantastical, star-driven proposition, unconnected from developments elsewhere in the modern movie marketplace, for which one is naturally predisposed to cheer. Which is why it grieves me to say something has been badly lost in translation, or wasn't there to begin with. Even with all these elements in its favour, Mothers' Instinct doesn't work - it just shuffles listlessly before us, illustrating mainly that the multiplex movie and the upmarket subtitled drama still have very different, maybe irreconciliable aims.

The set-up betrays its own kind of squandered promise, describing the seesawing relations between two initially subtly contrasted neighbours in one especially gleaming, well-tended American suburb as it was at the turn of the 1960s. Celine (Hathaway) is sensual, carefree and happy, seemingly well placed to thrive in the decade ahead, with a young son and an upstanding husband (Josh Charles). Chastain's Alice, on the other hand, strikes the eye as more brittle and buttoned-down, not to mention controlling, trad wife status unhappily conferred on her by a condescending other half (Anders Danielsen Lie) who forbids her from returning to the journalism gig she had before becoming a mother. The two women start out as close friends - practically the only support they've got in this deeply paternalistic society - but their bond is complicated, frayed and finally severed completely by a succession of tragedies that set us to reassessing which of these characters is truly empowered, and who's merely trying to save face. It could well be that Alice's fear-the-worst pessimism and rough-and-ready backstory leaves her better prepared for the vicissitudes of life than her neighbour, a source of nagging disquiet that possibly isn't enough to sustain a feature of this magnitude, and in any event gets increasingly badly fumbled.

If Mothers' Instinct more or less retains curio status, that's for two reasons. One, it's semi-startling in 2024 to witness a film that luxuriates so completely in white privilege; there's not even a token Black gardener or domestic on hand to throw our girls' upholstered travails into stark relief. Two, this will almost certainly stand as the most stubbornly two-and-a-half star film of this calendar year, rarely rising above torpid mediocrity as its appetising ingredients fail to produce the desired cake. What anyone troubling to sit through it will glean is that Delhomme is at this point a far stronger imagemaker than he is a director of actors or generator of tension; and that there is a crucial distinction between the visual art of cinematography and finding the necessary angles, the right narrative points of view, to tell a truly enveloping and satisfying story. Hathaway and Chastain are intelligent enough to make their own choices, and you can just about spy what may have drawn them here. For Chastain, it's playing squarer than she typically would; for Hathaway darker and more troubled. Yet in the race to get to the novel's neatly symmetrical punchline, Alice and Celine are rarely seen as anything other than Quaalude-placid or comically worked up; the material that would allow the leads to move smoothly through the gears has gone walkabout, along with the necessary psychological motivation. (It feels like a cinematographer's film: all surface, no depth.) That's odd in itself, because Mothers' Instinct has broadly been steered along a very moderate path, resistant to the extremes of camp, tiptoeing instead between the wry ironies of Todd Haynes's recent period recreations (Far from Heaven, Carol) and the banal pieties of the average tug-of-love TV movie. Delhomme shoots even the more thriller-specific material like costume drama, as if we needed more time to admire the pantsuit Chastain wears while creeping about the Hathaway household. The more than faintly baffling result is a film with a mounting bodycount - a mother-in-law collapsing in the flowerbed; a young lad succumbs to Chekhov's peanut allergy; some nasty, old-school chloroform business - but no coherent idea of how to broach it, that doesn't seem to know whether these events are darkly funny, dramatic, horrifying, or anything other than the elegantly attired shrug they currently represent. It's not as simple as they don't make 'em like they used to, you conclude - it's that they're now more likely to get 'em sadly wrong.

Mothers' Instinct is now playing in cinemas nationwide.