The premise

The two actors play next-door neighbours whose lives become interlinked with guilt, tragedy, and manipulations. The premise has it all: campiness, costumes, and a spiral of melodrama. But alas, the result is a movie too sunlit, too heavy-handed, and a bit too serious for its own good.

Celine (Anne Hathaway) and Alice (Jessica Chastain) are suburban housewives who become the best of friends, understanding each other’s dreams and moods like long-lost sisters. Alice is holding together well considering how delicate her condition was at one point, and Celine provides her able support- two women who share the joys and worries of motherhood. Their pitch-perfect lives come crashing down with the shocking death of Celine’s son Max (Baylen D Bielitz), who slips and falls from his home’s balcony above. Alice blames herself, and Celine can no longer stand to face her.

This devastating loss tears apart the domestic idyll of Celine and Alice’s lives. Celine’s husband Damian (Josh Charles) takes to the bottle, and their relationship gets a little worse every passing day. Her depression threatens to ruin the façade that the neighbours try to pull in the months after, even as Alice cannot seem to understand how to save a friend.

What works

Alice has her own anxieties along the way, which become more real as she realizes that Celine might be plotting something way more sinister behind those empty stares. Her husband Simon (Anders Danielsen Lie) does not believe her. Is she daydreaming? Can this be real?

Mother’s Instinct has so much potential to be one of those campy, highly entertaining yet morbid psychodrama of the year that make for a perfect repeat watch. However, the telling lacks nuance and a keen eye for character. The tone, often punctuated with brightly lit frames of pastel-coloured outfits, rings decidedly off to pull this melodrama to its pulpiest potential.

Final thoughts

Jessica Chastain is wonderful in the rather thankless part and makes Alice’s fragility her greatest weapon. She is matched beautifully by Hathaway’s razor-sharp assessment of Celine—a woman slowly losing a sense of herself. One wishes they had the chance to go more theatrical with these roles; these women had all the elements to go for a Joan Crawford-Bette Davis-like dirt-slinging. However, it lacks the killer instinct of a Hitchcockian thriller.

Nevertheless, Mother’s Instinct manages to be a willingly safe melodrama that settles its dust without much trouble.

Mother’s Instinct is now available to watch on Lionsgate Play.