*Spoilers are to be expected*
“Science likes to strut around and Act Smart by putting its labels on everything, but if you look at them closely, you’ll see that they don’t really say much. “Genes”? “DNA”? Just scratching the surface. “Instinct”? You know what that means:
CURIOUS: “Why do birds fly South for the winter?”
SCIENCE: “Instinct.”
It means, “We don’t know.””
– From The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff
The 2024 film, Mothers’ Instinct is an adaptation of the 2018 French film, Duelles, which was based on the novel of the same name by Barbara Abel. In the film, Alice, played by Jessica Chastain, lives next door to Céline, played by Anne Hathaway. When Alice sees Céline’s son Max, played by Baylen D. Bielitz, balancing precariously on the balustrade of her neighbour’s balcony, Alice runs into her neighbour’s house to pull Max back down, but she gets there too late and Max falls to his death.
Following the tragedy, Céline starts hanging around with Alice’s son, Theo, played by Eamon Patrick O’Connell, but she does several things that make Alice worried about her intentions towards him. Céline puts ‘Bunny’, the cuddly rabbit toy that Theo cannot sleep without, in the open casket with the body of Max, leading to Theo having a justifiable outburst at Max’s funeral. Céline does eventually give the toy back to Theo, asking for forgiveness.
Other suspect actions by Céline include taking Theo onto the same balcony of the house that Max fell from to blow bubbles; helping fix the birdhouse that Max had made and had been trying to hang on a branch when he fell to his death; and putting nuts out at a dinner party she has invited Alice’s family to when Theo is allergic to nuts, then suggesting he go and find something from the draining board, where he proceeds to eat some peanut butter cookies that cause him to have an allergic reaction. This series of questionable acts are dismissed by everyone but Alice as the thoughtless actions of a grieving mother.
The third act reveals that that Céline has killed Jean, played by Caroline Lagerfelt, the mother of Simon, played by Anders Danielsen Lie. She then murders her own husband, Damian, played by Josh Charles, making it look like a suicide. This raises the question of why nobody but Alice is suspicious how so much tragedy is occurring around Céline. It cannot be because she is a woman, as if it was then Céline’s actions would be equally questioned. There is the possibility that Céline is believed because nobody wants to look too deeply into the actions of a grieving mother, but this is not enough on its own to establish the vast difference between how the two women’s stories are received.
Alice is not believed when she instinctually knows the truth, but Céline is believed despite a mountain of circumstantial evidence that suggests she is lying. The fundamental difference between Alice and Céline is that Alice does not conform to the early 60’s American ideal of the suburban housewife, while Céline does. The juxtaposition is established in an early scene during a cocktail party when Céline’s husband, Damian, tells Céline that she has had enough to drink and should not have another, which she accepts because she is subservient to her husband. In contrast, when Damian says that he is worried about John F Kennedy being too young to be President and handle the Soviets at the age of 44, Alice reels off a list of Theodore Roosevelt’s accomplishments in office and points out that he became President at 43. The problem for Alice is not that she is a woman, but that she is an intelligent woman.
Alice has another thing going against her, which is that she has previously been committed to a mental institution. Her husband, Simon, played by Anders Danielsen Lie, even threatens at one point to have her committed again. She had previously been institutionalised following a feeling of guilt over her parents’ death in a car crash, for which she felt responsible despite being asleep in the back seat.
It is often the case that people with psychiatric disorders who make a complaint to the police are dismissed because of those same disorders. It does not matter whether they have a legitimate grievance: the mere fact of them having a disorder ensures that their testimony is liable to be challenged on its veracity or even dismissed. This makes them the most vulnerable in society: people who can be victimised without recourse to intervention from authority. This leads to a phenomenon that could be described as ‘invisible crime’: crimes that are reported to the police or whatever relevant authority whose job it is to enforce the law, but they can say that the victim is making it up, that they clearly believe what is not true, or that there simply is not enough evidence for it, so it will not become an ‘unsolved crime’ but rather a ‘never-was’ crime, something whose very existence massages police targets.
When Alice finds her mother-in-law’s heart medication in a flowerbed, she realises that Céline has swapped it out for something else, asks for an autopsy, and discovers that the heart medication was not present in her body, despite both her and her husband seeing her take it. Her husband, rather than saying “Huh, that’s weird, we should really look into that.”, instead berates her for getting an autopsy on his mother’s body without her consent.
This is the third reason, after being an intelligent woman and having a history of mental illness, why Alice is not believed. When trying to convince someone of something, you need the person being addressed to either want to believe or at least be open to the possibility of believing. Early in the film, Alice talks about maybe going to back to work as a journalist at the gazette but is told by her husband that if she really wants to get back into reporting, she could write something for the school paper. This is textbook patronising, a word that comes from the Latin ‘Patronus’, meaning master, which comes from ‘Pater’, meaning father, implying talking condescendingly to someone like a father to a child. Simon telling her she could write something for the school paper could not fit this etymology more neatly. Alice is not believed by Simon because he thinks he is smarter than her. Céline, however, is believed because she is not trying to change the beliefs of others, only doing one thing and then providing her summary of events before the listener has time to form their own conclusions.
The film ends with a decision that ‘in this highly unusual situation’ Céline should become Theo’s guardian, but nobody questions why this ‘highly unusual situation’ arose. This is the fourth and final reason nobody believes what Alice was trying to convince them of: it was simpler to accept it. It was simpler for Simon to believe that his mother forgot his heart medication, it was simpler for him to believe that Alice was having a bout of female hysteria, and it was simpler for the person in charge of deciding the fate of Theo not to question why everyone around Céline except the boy died.
Alice was not believed because she was a smart woman, because she had a history of being diagnosed with a mental illness, because nobody was open to believing her and because it was simpler not to believe her. She had a ‘Mothers’ Instinct’, a correct one about what was truly happening, but she was unable to explain how she knew because the problem with instinct is that it is, ultimately, unexplainable.
Horses All The Way Down 