When Toddy Haynes’s May December was released last year, it prompted a worldwide (or at least Twitter-wide) reckoning with the meaning of camp. There were furious debates as to the exact parameters of the term and which works fell within them. For Mothers’ Instinct, this matter becomes a kind of existential crisis, because celebrated cinematographer Benoît Delhomme’s 1960s-set directorial debut can’t decide whether it wants to be considered camp or not, as it awkwardly pitches itself between a somber drama and antic melodrama.
Like May December, this remake of the Olivier Masset-Depasse’s 2018 film Duelles is a domestic drama that throws two women into the same space and steadily ratchets up the tension between them. Alice (Jessica Chastain) and Céline (Anne Hathaway) live in neighboring homes in the suburbs. Alice’s son Theo (Eamon Patrick O’Connell) and Céline’s son Max (Baylen D. Bielitz) are best friends,...
Like May December, this remake of the Olivier Masset-Depasse’s 2018 film Duelles is a domestic drama that throws two women into the same space and steadily ratchets up the tension between them. Alice (Jessica Chastain) and Céline (Anne Hathaway) live in neighboring homes in the suburbs. Alice’s son Theo (Eamon Patrick O’Connell) and Céline’s son Max (Baylen D. Bielitz) are best friends,...
- 4/13/2024
- by Ross McIndoe
- Slant Magazine
Esteemed cinematographer Benoît Delhomme’s credits have included a conspicuous number of thoughtful, visually sumptuous period pieces, such as The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Theory of Everything and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, as well as a few films made to promote fashion brands like Balmain, Dior and Chanel. In a way, that résumé partially explains why he might have been inclined to make his directorial debut with Mothers’ Instinct, for which he also serves as the Dp.
This pulpy, psychologically shallow and yet beautifully shot period thriller is all about two soignée suburban housewives — played by Jessica Chastain and Anne Hathaway — who spend the film’s 96 minutes suffering, scheming and losing their minds while wearing immaculate vintage-inspired costumes. Ultimately, the characters’ motivations, like their titular instinct, are weakly delineated, but viewers are well-advised not to worry their pretty little heads about any of that and just concentrate on the pantsuits.
A remake of a 2018 Belgian film,...
This pulpy, psychologically shallow and yet beautifully shot period thriller is all about two soignée suburban housewives — played by Jessica Chastain and Anne Hathaway — who spend the film’s 96 minutes suffering, scheming and losing their minds while wearing immaculate vintage-inspired costumes. Ultimately, the characters’ motivations, like their titular instinct, are weakly delineated, but viewers are well-advised not to worry their pretty little heads about any of that and just concentrate on the pantsuits.
A remake of a 2018 Belgian film,...
- 3/28/2024
- by Leslie Felperin
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Not every good film is necessarily a good time, and vice versa. On the latter front, see “Mothers’ Instinct,” a 1960s-set suburban psychodrama 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. As a pair of model homemakers and next-door neighbors whose close friendship is severely undone by sudden tragedy, even stars Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain don’t always seem to be making entirely the same movie: Hathaway’s sly, high-gloss vamping points to a more brittly amusing one than Chastain’s earnest emotional commitment, turning their characters’ escalating picket-fence battle into a compelling tussle for the soul of the script itself. One wins, and not predictably so.
First-time feature director Benoît Delhomme, however, doesn’t have much command over this strange,...
First-time feature director Benoît Delhomme, however, doesn’t have much command over this strange,...
- 3/27/2024
- by Guy Lodge
- Variety Film + TV
It wouldn’t take much to convince an unsuspecting audience member that Mothers’ Instinct is the latest dispatch from the Don’t Worry Darling cinematic universe. The directorial debut of cinematographer Benoît Delhomme initially appears to be a surface-level rendering of a bygone era, a vaguely defined late 1950s or early 1960s, in which the women are talked out of career prospects and encouraged to stay at home to be wives and mothers, first and foremost, kept at a distance from their husbands’ lives. But, of course, nefarious secrets are discovered to be closer to home and far lower in concept within this stylish melodrama, which hews far closer to the “women’s pictures” of the period depicted in both style and substance than the campier thriller it’s being presented as––though those looking for the latter will still get what they ordered courtesy of Anne Hathaway’s brilliantly rendered turn as grieving mother Céline.
- 3/26/2024
- by Alistair Ryder
- The Film Stage
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