Mothers’ Instinct: Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain excel in psychodrama that’s either ludicrous on purpose or just by accident

Enjoy an insight into the critical process. At the centre of my barely legible notes, written in the dark, I find the enigmatic words: “Is this bad? Maybe this is actually good.” Put it this way. If Todd Haynes had directed the same cast in the same (fabulous) costumes, with the same screenplay and the same camera set-ups, Mothers’ Instinct could have turned out a copper-bottomed masterpiece. If a great director from America’s post-classical 1970s were among the credits then this very film – the one on the screen – may have ended up on Cahiers du Cinema’s top 10 of the year.

Neither of those things happened. Perhaps the (I bet this is the adjective they’d plump for) psychological thriller is unaware of how archly it converses with cliches from America’s pre-Kennedy complacency. Perhaps it doesn’t know that Jessica Chastain – she and Anne Hathaway deserve streets named after them for their work here – is always smoking as if she knows she’s smoking: sparking and sucking with the same effort she’d bring to digging a big hole.

Can the filmmakers really believe in these costumes? Prepare to swoon at the powder-blue floral jumpsuit that Chastain wears when surreptitiously investigating her next-door neighbour’s cellar. In mourning, Hathaway doesn’t seem to just be acknowledging Jackie Kennedy’s legendary grief, she looks to be actually playing the late president’s widow. That veil. Those gloves. It’s all magnificent. It’s all ludicrous. But none of it seems to be ludicrous on purpose. Maybe the film is just bad.

Based on a 2018 French film that itself derived from a novel by Barbara Abel, Mothers’ Instinct hangs around the tense relations between two glamorous housewives in suburban American of 1960. It is the period popular culture fell in love with 15 years ago as the likes of Mad Men and Revolutionary Road reminded us the “Sixties” didn’t happen until some way into the 1960s. When men wore thin-lapelled suits and women dressed for the school run as they now dress for weddings. When the white, upper-middle class United States was at its most dangerously smug.

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Chastain, a frustrated former journalist, fusses over a child with, in lieu of the Chekhovian gun over the mantlepiece, a potentially fatal nut allergy. Hathaway is nervously content raising a son who took a while to arrive and who, following gynaecological complications, she knows will be her last. It is hardly giving anything way to reveal – the opening scenes swell with menace – that something awful happens early on and the two women end up at each other’s throats. It takes a while to descend into anything like frying pans being slammed on expensive permanent waves. But the low simmer is enough to be going on with.

It is safe to assume that Benoît Delhomme, as a French man, worships at the Church of Hitchcock and, sure enough, all the superficial indicators are in place. Only Chastain is here blond, but both she and Hathaway are dressed for enigmatic flirtation with Cary Grant or James Stewart. Delhomme, making his directorial debut after 30 years as a celebrated cinematographer, is, however, 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.

For good or ill, Mothers’ Instinct is all about the extravagantly appointed celebration of a period – and of attitudes – that are now hard to address without bold inverted commas. The plot is rubbish. Nobody seems comfortable putting tongue anywhere near cheek. If the costumes were any more heightened you’d demand a song and dance number. All of which makes it hard to look anywhere else. But good? Probably not. Bad? Maybe not that either. Down with star ratings.

In cinemas from March 29th