Mothers’ Instinct is a perfectly solid domestic thriller with two Oscar-winning movie stars that barely got a North American release.
The often agreeable but deeply cynical Deadpool & Wolverine ran rampant at the box office this weekend, breaking records and giving another shot of adrenalin to a theatrical business direly in need of it. But amidst all that clamor, another movie was released in North America last Friday, one that deserves far more than the meager rollout it received. Why was Mothers’ Instinct all but disappeared?
The film, an adaptation of a 2018 French movie, is not obscure art-house fare. It’s a satisfying thriller-melodrama starring two Oscar winners, Jessica Chastain and Anne Hathaway. Directed by Benoît Delhomme, Mothers’ Instinct isn’t exactly on par with The Hand That Rocks the Cradle or Fatal Attraction, shining emblems of the heyday of domestic suspense. But it is at least gesturing toward that once beloved but now moldering genre, albeit with a bit more drama.
Mothers’ Instinct initially appears to be a story of grief’s corrosive effect, a study in how the tightly ordered mores of a community crumble once something shocking and horrible has disrupted the system. Hathaway plays the mother of a boy who dies in a tragic accident in early 1960s suburbia; Chastain is the friend and neighbor who tried to prevent the child’s fall from a balcony, but failed. Chastain’s Alice blames herself, and maybe Hathaway’s Céline does too. Her grief certainly manifests in strange and inscrutable ways; before too long, Alice begins to wonder if maybe her friend is trying to exact retribution, or to steal Alice’s son for herself.
Mothers’ Instinct could easily have left that mounting alarm and suspicion in the background, illustrating the kind of warped magical thinking that can arise from trauma. But bless it, the film instead leans into its suggestions of danger, morphing itself into something far more in-line with a domestic thriller from the ’90s than, say, A Map of the World. Which is all to say that Mothers’ Instinct is fun, in a throwback sort of a way. The performances are big and appealing; the period stylings are relatively lush for a lower-budget movie. Sure, there’s some silly stuff, overheated moments that merit guffaws—but that’s part of the mission of movies like this. There were no press screenings of the film, but I had a blast seeing the movie in the theater as a paying customer, at the one showtime (10:20AM) offered at the one theater in the whole of New York City where the movie was playing last Friday. (One of only six theaters showing the movie in the U.S.)
The scarcity of screenings seems to indicate that its US distributor, indie darling Neon, has chosen to bury the film, perhaps because Mothers’ Instinct did not get good reviews or make any waves at the box office when it was released overseas awhile ago. It’s already available on various international airlines’ on-demand video portals. Maybe Neon didn’t see a path for the movie to find any traction in North America; they know their business better than I do, so I guess I will have to defer to them. (We reached out to Neon through reps to get their side of the story and will update if they respond.)
But, maybe, with some marketing oompf behind it, Mothers’ Instinct could have become a little specialty hit. (Despite it being pretty much entirely mainstream in construction and content.) The movie is at least worth some kind of effort. Or maybe the better move would have been to slough it off to a streamer, where those so inclined could watch it from the wine-soaked comfort of their couches. Any strategy would have been better than the one Mothers’ Instinct received, the sort usually reserved for truly radioactive movies.
Mothers’ Instinct is decidedly not one of those. It is slickly made and thoroughly entertaining, flamboyant flourishes and all. But it seems that, with a few minor exceptions, no one really knows what to do with movies like it anymore. Stories of this exact scope are now stretched into tedious 8-hour (or more) limited series, or they are told in far flimsier fashion in made-for-streaming junk. It may be true that audience interest in this kind of mid-range picture has dwindled, but might that partly be because they have been so mishandled for so long? Audiences can’t make decisions about movies they don’t even know exist.
Giving Mothers’ Instinct a proper release may have aided, in some small way, in the project of retraining audiences to seek its ilk out in theaters—just as Anyone But You might have done for the romcom. For what it’s worth, my little screening on Friday morning was nearly sold out.
