Mothers' Instinct (2024)

Mothers' Instinct arrives with the quiet confidence of a picture that knows exactly what it is: a two-hander for Jessica Chastain and Anne Hathaway in which two 1960s housewives, neighbors and friends, are slowly dismantled by grief, suspicion, and a hedge. That the film is headlined by two women in a genre usually reserved for men is its most notable act of cultural positioning, and it is a modest one. The camera admires the sunhats and the station wagons, the immaculate kitchens and the rose prunings, and asks nothing of them beyond atmosphere.

The motherhood on display is melodramatic machinery, not argument. Céline's grief curdles into something patient and predatory, and the film lets her son's death function as a plot engine, which is a long way from a thesis about mothers or the conditions imposed upon them. The cast is white, the suburb is white, and the year 1960 is invoked for the pleasure of the costumes. Race, class, money, and the arrangements that produce such lawns go unexamined. The affluent setting is wallpaper.

The remainder is pulp, executed with a straight face. A child dies, a mother-in-law drops dead, a medication is swapped, a boiler is disconnected, and the final act settles into a gas leak and an adoption. Nobody pauses to explain the moral of any of it, and that restraint is worth a small nod. The film wants to unsettle, not instruct. It succeeds intermittently. For the purposes of classification, this is a thriller wearing period clothing, a remake of a French picture that was itself drawn from a novel, ambitious only in its willingness to let two movie stars stare at each other across a hedge until something breaks. The stare is the point. The hedge is the point. There is not much else.