Avis des critiques

Mothers' Instinct doesn't work - it just shuffles listlessly before us, illustrating mainly that the multiplex movie and the upmarket subtitled drama still have very different, maybe irreconciliable aims.

The film’s fawning admiration for the work of the Master of Suspense only serves to highlight how heavy-handed the plotting is by comparison. It’s a pity that the screenplay stumbles, because Chastain and, in particular, Hathaway take to the melodramatic register of the piece like olives to an ice-cold martini.

Can the filmmakers really believe in these costumes? ...It’s all magnificent. It’s all ludicrous. But none of it seems to be ludicrous on purpose... [Delhomme] is saddled with a screenplay that utterly fumbles the positioning of its red herring. The middle act nods to one of the more audacious plots from golden-age cinema, but a later correction brings us back to a much less interesting place.

Pulpy, psychologically shallow and yet beautifully shot... The fatal mistake with [Mothers' Instinct] is that it takes itself so drearily seriously and seems to think it’s offering an incisive critique of mid-20th century patriarchy, or some such. It’s like a pop-up book version of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique that comes with a supplementary paper doll set so you can change the lead characters’ outfits.

The tension that [Mothers' Instinct] builds and sustains isn't so much squandered as allowed to run away. While the audience is left knowing some things the answers we're given aren't satisfying and nor are the questions left.

Hilariously unsubtle and increasingly ridiculous... [Mothers' Instinct] starts out very serious and shocking and concludes on a note of pure farce, though I have to say Chastain’s performance has a clenched restraint which is marginally more convincing than Hathaway’s operatic but callow displays of hurt and entitlement.

[Mothers' Instinct is] too silly to secure our belief and too reserved to pass muster as go-for-broke camp — but still compulsive enough, twisty enough and finally berserk enough to keep us hooked through all its tonal and narrative lane-changing.

Delhomme can’t find his way into this loopy material, merely luring his stars through their soignée wardrobe fittings into a series of stale dead ends. The whole film is stumped and glum, not to mention visually unappetising beyond the frocks – Delhomme, who also shot it, couldn’t very well fire himself.

While a committed Chastain and Hathaway do their utmost to inject some gravitas into proceedings there are some moments which border on the absurd, particularly as it reaches its frenzied climax. Still, there is some fun to be found in the arch campness of it all and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the film looks gorgeous.

Sophisticated, adult thrillers are few and far between, and Mothers’ Instinct fills the void admirably. With vivid, striking imagery and top-notch production design, the film paints an exciting, moreish portrait of psychological intrigue.