Film review: Mothers' Instinct sees Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain impress

Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain star in Mothers' Instinct

• Mothers' Instinct
• ★★★★☆
• Cinema release

Grief can be a cruelly warping emotion, as Celine (Anne Hathaway) discovers in Mothers’ Instinct (15A). 

Neighbours in an idyllic American suburb in the early 1960s, Celine and Alice (Jessica Chastain) are best friends whose young sons Max (Baylen D. Bieltiz) and Theo (Eamon Patrick O’Connell) are inseparable.

But when Max dies in a tragic accident witnessed from afar by a helpless Alice, the devasted Celine blames Alice for not preventing her child’s death, and soon the former friends find themselves spiralling down through mistrust and mutual suspicion into full-blown paranoia.

Adapted from Barbara Abel’s novel by Sarah Conradt, with Benoît Delhomme directing, this lavish production — the period details, from fashion to cars, are eye-catchingly impressive — opens as a genteel satire on a stifling patriarchy, as represented by Josh Charles and Anders Danielsen Lie, Celine and Alice’s affable, clubbable husbands.

But when tragedy strikes, the film swiftly segues into something rather different, a psychological thriller that at times reads like an homage to the melodramas of Douglas Sirk.

Both leads are in superb form, crafting wonderfully brittle characters whose surface style and composure gradually crumbles in the face of desolating loss, a collapse likely rooted in their lifelong experience of being suffocated by their era’s constricting gender expectations.

Elegantly directed by Benoit Delhomme, Mothers’ Instinct is a powerful, affecting drama that pulls up grief by the roots to expose the darkness beneath.