A borderline impossible game of Taboo could be played if one were tasked with describing Olivier Masset-Depasse’s “Mothers’ Instinct” without using the word “Hitchcockian.” The Belgian director’s luxuriant psychological thriller is so redolent of the Master of Suspense’s style, and so gorgeously robed in Thierry Delettre’s ’60s costuming that at times one expects star Veerle Baetens (“The Broken Circle Breakdown”) to turn around and just be Tippi Hedren all of a sudden.
But as much as this deliciously enjoyable, spiral-shaped descent into darkness wears that influence on its immaculately cut, three-quarter-length sleeve, it also represents a subversion of even Hitch’s most femme-centric titles.
Here, the devotion, jealousy, coercion, and, indeed, “Suspicion” that underpin his conception of male-female relations are ascribed to a female friendship instead.Basing the screenplay on the novel “Derrière la haine” by Barbara Abel, Masset-Depasse and co-writers Giordano Gederlini and François Verjans
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