Mother’s Instinct (2024) **

Another cheat. Anatomy of a Fall Part Two. Let’s set the story in the early 1960s when cops were too dumb to think it unusual that three adults in neighboring houses could commit suicide within a very short space of time. Let’s just plain ignore the fact that the woman who has lost a child miraculously gains one from this unlikely sequence of events – in fact let’s give it our blessing and  allow a woman who’s plain loopy to adopt an orphan because, as we all know, sentiment runs wild in adoption cases.

Let’s saddle the audience with the kind of serious actors whose normal instinct would be to run a mile from this shoddy bill of goods. Yikes, we can’t even blame a manager or  casting director because Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain not only signed up to this but are behind it being brought to the screen, they are the producers.  

Bad things happen to glamorous people would be a more sensible take on these shenanigans and if the movie had gone down the more interesting route of how the well-off cope with grief and loss it would have worked even when these are the kind of mean mothers who would give mean mothers of the male variety a bad name. This is filled with the kind of underplayed bad acting that Oscar winners think they can get away with.

Both mothers have a get-out-of-jail-free card. Celine (Anne Hathaway) can’t have any more children and is the kind of fun mother who rarely exists in real life. Alice (Jessica Chastain) is a lot less fun because she’s saddled with a kid, Theo (Eamon Patrick O’Connell), who will die if he eats peanut butter and is prevented from going back out to work because, heck, what would the neighbours say. Plus, their husbands are only pretending to be lovey-dovey and the minute their wives start behaving like nutters out comes the finger-waving and dragging by the arm.

And it pivots on the dumbest of pivots. Celine’s son falls off a balcony. Alice, in her garden seeing the boy teetering precariously on a ledge, screams a warning that Celine can’t hear pecause perfect housewife that she is she’s busy with the vaccum and that just makes so much noise it shuts out the screaming of a demented woman. And if that dumb pivot isn’t enough Celine thinks that Alice thinks (you see where this is going) that it’s all her fault. That, presumably, she didn’t scream loud enough.

Worse, dumb pivot No 3, Alice places Theo’s beloved fluffy toy bunny alongside the corpse in the (natch!) open coffin (as if every parent at the funeral service just wants to gawp at a dead child) and Theo (who, of course, needed to sneak a peak at his dead buddy) kicks off and is the first of the people to be dragged off somewhere by the exasperated adult male.

Of course, when the women fall out, it doesn’t occur to Celine to ask Alice for her front door key back. Nor, when Alice sneaks into Celine’s house, is the former, suddenly returning, capable of noticing the pair of high heel shoes Alice left in the foyer so she could creep about the house undisturbed.

This is just so bonkers it overrides all the good bits. The Mad Men Meets Desperate Housewives malarkey, the men who can’t believe they’ve got it so good, scoring wives way out of their league, nice kids, food on the table, cocktails aplenty, the women all dolled up like they stepped out of a fashion catalog, and intelligent conversation about John F. Kennedy and Jackie O before she became Jackie O.  

But this relies not just on your suspending disbelief but on you sympathizing with two women you would run a mile to avoid them. It’s based on a French film (Duelles) and I’m wondering if the French had a way of getting away with this kind of stuff. Nope, wait a minute, it was the French who came up with Anatomy of a Fall.

This was the start of my Quadruple Bill – I was catching up because I’d spent the previous Monday at the theater (blasphemy, I know) watching Hamilton – and I though this looked a winner.

So it’s a big nope from me.