Kritiken

Adam Driver's a good actor, and Alba Rohrwacher's maybe a too-good one, because I can't even input her name without feeling the absolute idiot hatefulness of the character she plays here... But the film, which I think aspires to be about different varieties of love and how they can pull us in contradictory directions, is such a determined miserabilist slog that it only ever registers as a high-handed exercise in sadism.

What began like a romantic comedy, then transformed into a moody relationship drama, now starts to become something else entirely: a stylized thriller from a student of Polanski's Repulsion and Todd Haynes's Safe, with a bit of Hitchcock's Marnie thrown in... Hungry Hearts is a troubled, troubling movie. The unrest it creates looms long after the end credits have rolled.

Ms. Rohrwacher's gentle expressiveness is flattened by a role requiring a monotonous strain of suspicion and mental imbalance. At one point, an extreme camera lens turns her into an apparition from those 1990s Steve Madden commercials. Mr. Driver applies his flair for picking through scenes and injecting sincere exasperation, but he, too, is boxed in by the child-in-peril plotting. So is Roberta Maxwell, as his abrasive, protective mother.

The film would have been more interesting, and far more credible, had it made at least a token attempt to empathize with Mina's concerns. Surely there are vegan parents who don't want to feed their children meat, and find ways to accomplish this that don't put the kids' lives at risk? Try Googling the topic, Jude!

Hungry Hearts is a siege thriller in a relationship drama's clothing. Despite the pretense that director Saverio Costanzo makes of examining the behavioral textures of a newlywed couple challenged by differing views of how to raise their child, his interests truly reside in goosing the audience with gross imperiled-child tactics characteristic of Fatal Attraction. The film, in fact, resembles a blend of Fatal Attraction and Kramer vs. Kramer.

There's no question that Hungry Hearts is a basically unpleasant viewing experience. From a narrative standpoint, the film makes you powerfully uneasy for the last two-thirds of its running time. But there's also a lot to be enjoyed, principally great performances from Driver and Rohrwacher and beautiful, richly textured and colored 16mm photography.

[The wife's] wispy angelic frame inhabited by a violent madness, Alba Rohrwacher gives a haunting performance. Adam Driver (also starring in Noah Baumbach's delectably mordant While We're Young) is equally powerful in the less showy part of the reasonable but helpless husband.

The film adopts a heavy-handed approach to explore a plausible issue and turns it into an implausible and ridiculous film. Is the director's idea of psychological introspection really fish-eye lensing? Is having watched Rosemary's Baby four times in high school a good enough excuse to make a movie? These and other puzzling questions await spectators eager to discover Costanzo's craftsmanship.

These early set-up scenes are superb – the acting is top notch – but when the film turns into a battle over the weight of their baby son, with Mina turning out to be a homeopathic medicine nut to the extent that she endangers the kid's life, the characters become decreasingly plausible.