Mothers’ Instinct review – Delhomme tries to throw in Hitchcock nods but it falls flat

MOTHERS' INSTINCT

(15) 94mins

★★☆☆☆

NEIGHBOURS should be there for one another, right?

Sixties housewives Alice (Jessica Chastain) and Celine (Anne Hathaway) always are.

They are the very best of friends who rely on each other in times of need.

Both mothers to a beloved son, they drink and smoke and moan about their husbands together. All in the most beautiful, skin tight designer dresses and high heels, worn while vacuuming the house and attending to the garden.

And it is while pruning the roses Alice witnesses the horrifying death of her bestie’s young son falling from the balcony of her dear neighbour’s house.

Paranoia seeps in

She tries to rescue him by clambering through the rosebush and racing into the home, but gets there seconds too late.

It is a sad and shocking moment, which Hathaway — as the mourning mum — plays well. Her flat, crazed eyes are unnerving.

This is soon followed by her desperation to appear “normal” and serve devilled eggs at dinner parties.

That isn’t the most bizarre thing about the mother’s grief, though.

Alice quickly makes it all about her, claiming her former best mate won’t hang out with her any more. Something I had very little sympathy for, as she parades her living son around in front of her neighbour.

This is after Alice reveals she has previously suffered with extreme paranoia and was placed in an institution.

She then becomes convinced Celine is trying to steal her son away. And then there’s a painfully long storyline about some disappearing medication.

So the set up is two women, both who have, well, issues. And only one son living between the two. And you don’t know who the baddie is — or even if there is one at all.

Directed by Benoit Delhomme, this is much more style over substance.

While the dresses are to die for, neither character seems capable of breaking more than a nail without taking to their bed. They’re not believable psychopaths.

Delhomme tries to throw in some Hitchcock nods, as though it’s a psycho-thriller but it falls flat.

This is a case where mother certainly doesn’t know best.

GODZILLA X KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE

(12A) 115mins

★☆☆☆☆

FANCY feeling as though your brain has been put in a washing machine for nearly two hours? Then this new instalment from the Monsterverse might be the film for you.

The fifth in the franchise sees the mighty King Kong and Godzilla join forces against a deadly threat.

They have the brute force and power to do it. But not before Kong comes back to normal Earth from Hollow Earth where he now lives.

And also encounters more of his own species, although most aren’t very nice to him.

Dr Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall), needs to find Kong, so along with scaredy-cat Bernie (Brian Tyree Henry), hyperactive Trapper (Dan Stevens) and her adopted daughter Jia (Kaylee Hottle) she’s off on a search in the dangerous Hollow Earth.

They need to reunite Kong with Godzilla so they can save humanity – while crushing most of it under their humongous feet in the over-long CGI fight sequences. The script is so nonsensical with the cast delivering the lines with less care than they would a pizza.

A jumbo monstrosity.

DRIFT

(15) 93mins

★★★☆☆

THIS is a slow burning character study of Liberian refugee, Jacqueline (Cynthia Erivo), who is homeless and living on a Greek island.

But Jacqueline speaks with an English accent and in flashbacks we see she’d had a romance in London.

Now, she is washing her one outfit in the sea every day and sleeping in a cave.

It’s a curious situation and her nightly ritual of laying out her makeshift mattress made of bags of pebbles every night is strangely hypnotic.

Based on 2013 novel, A Marker To Measure Drift, Jacqueline’s horrific trauma of the violence to her family is played out in flashbacks and told to American tour guide Callie (Alia Shawkat).

She sees more than most would in Jacqueline making their friendship instantly valuable. Erivo’s presence is commanding, her face and manner changing beyond recognition between her time in London to the homeless woman in Greece.

But it is mostly the gentle lapping of the sea that you hear more than dialogue in this deeply sensitive film, where a little too much is left unsaid.