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...
Basing the screenplay on the novel “Derrière la haine” by Barbara Abel, Masset-Depasse and co-writers Giordano Gederlini and François Verjans...
- 9/26/2018
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
Tiff Review: ‘Duelles (Mothers’ Instinct)’ Brings Melodramatic Suspense to an Idyllic Bourgeois Home
Director Olivier Masset-Depasse lets us know exactly what to expect out of Duelles (Mothers’ Instinct) from the start, introducing an idyllic bourgeois home with all the sensory cues to foreshadow melodramatic suspense. Alice Brunelle (Veerle Baetens) peers out her window as neighbor Céline Geniot (Anne Coesens) leaves, rushes out once the car pulls away. She enters the woman’s adjoining home with a set of keys to clandestinely move through and close the curtains. We assume the worst: an affair. The music manipulates this suspenseful thought, the camera in-close to lend an anxiously frenetic tone to her movements. And then Céline returns, sensing something amiss. We brace for the reveal as Masset-Depasse provides it with a sly smile, simultaneously proving we got worked up for nothing and that we weren’t wrong to do so.
He and co-writers Giordano Gederlini and François Verjans wield these tools of sight and sound throughout the film,...
He and co-writers Giordano Gederlini and François Verjans wield these tools of sight and sound throughout the film,...
- 9/10/2018
- by Jared Mobarak
- The Film Stage
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