Mother's Instinct (2024)
When I discuss parenting with anyone, my line is typically that is both the greatest and worst thing you will ever do. Raising a child (or two in my case) is incredibly rewarding, especially when you see them learn and grow, taking lessons you've given them and becoming their own little people. But along with that pride and joy comes unending stress, anxiety, and panic that you will ruin your child, your child will become a terrible person (and it will all point back to you), or, God forbid, you could lose your child. Those fears alone should be enough to make a person go crazy, but add into it the fact that millions of other people are doing the exact same thing and may be better at it than you, judge you for the way you do it, or take it upon themselves to correct the mistakes you are making with your own children by bonding with them over something you can't fully understand.
In 1960s suburbia, neighbors Alice Bradford (Jessica Chastain) and Céline Jennings (Anne Hathaway) are close friends and mothers to boys the same age - until Céline's son Max dies in a fall from a balcony that Alice spots too late and can't prevent in time, despite both women scrambling to reach him. The tragedy fractures their friendship, with Céline pulling away from Alice but growing strangely close to her son Theo (Eamon O'Connell) instead; after a mysterious month-long disappearance, Céline returns and the two women reconcile - though a near-repeat of the balcony incident, this time with Theo, leaves Alice convinced Céline had engineered it as a test of her instincts. As Céline inserts herself deeper into Theo's life, a string of suspicious deaths and near-misses follow, including Alice's mother-in-law and a severe allergic reaction that hospitalizes Theo, all pointing to Céline's involvement, though Alice's attempts to find proof come up empty. The women reconcile once more after Theo threatens self-harm over their ongoing feud, but when Alice's family decides to move away to escape Céline, she murders her own husband and stages it as a suicide, then moves in with Alice's family under the guise of grief. When Alice discovers Céline sedating Simon (Anders Danielsen Lee) and Theo, the two finally fight it out - and Céline kills both Alice and Simon by staging a gas leak, sparing only Theo, whom she goes on to adopt.
There's something missing at the core of this movie, even though it's entertaining enough in its pulpy, Douglas Sirk-ian production design. Everything looks right - the manicured suburban lawns, the mid-century interiors, the sense of two families living just close enough to breathe down each other's necks - but the film never quite decides what it wants to say with all that surface polish. Imagine a director like Todd Haynes (Carol, May December, Far from Heaven) taking this material and using that Sirkian aesthetic as a genuine lens rather than a costume. Or imagine Todd Field (Little Children, In the Bedroom, Tár) approaching it, where every performance and silence carries the weight of a specific, unflinching point of view. What those filmmakers understand is that the "is she crazy or isn't she" premise is only interesting as a means to something larger - about grief, control, class, motherhood itself. Here, that question is treated as the destination rather than the vehicle, and the film never pushes past it. Sure, it portends to focus on both their dealings with grief, but it feels manufactured and isn't nuanced at all. Chastain and Hathaway both give commendable performances given what they're working with, wringing real tension out of glances and clipped dialogue, but the ending lands with a thud, resolving the tension without illuminating it. The husbands, meanwhile, are barely sketched - present mostly as furniture to react to their wives - and while this is unmistakably a story about the mothers, that imbalance still leaves the film feeling incomplete, like half a thesis.
The idea of Céline essentially gaslighting Alice is a strong hook, rich with potential for something genuinely unsettling, but it's handled clumsily in execution. Alice's backstory gestures toward a history of paranoia, which conveniently makes it easier for the audience to believe she might be imagining things - but that detail is dropped in without the psychological groundwork to support it. It plays less like character development and more like a narrative shortcut, a way to manufacture ambiguity without earning it. The film gestures at psychological complexity but never builds the scaffolding underneath it.
In the end, Mother's Instinct is a handsomely mounted, well-acted thriller that never digs as deep as its premise promises. Should it have been campier? Maybe. Could it have spent more time fleshing out the leads? Absolutely. I might be giving it an extra half-star for the movie it could have been, if it had the guts to go there.
3 out of 5 Stars
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