Director: Benoit Delhomme
Starring: Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain
Starring: Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain
Running Time: 94 minutes
Synopsis: In the early 1960s, suburban housewives Celine and Alice (Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain) are next-door neighbours and best friends. Celine is mother to Max and cannot have any more children. Alice suffers from anxieties and is constantly worried about her son Theo, who is allergic to nuts. Celine and Alice's husbands both have good jobs, while Max and Theo are best friends. A tragedy interrupts the near-idyllic lives of the two families, testing the women's close bond.
What Works Well: Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain are both in fine form, and infuse Celine and Alice with enough ambiguities to initially sustain a mystery thick with opaque motivations and insidious manipulations. The costumes and hairstyles admirably evoke a chic middle-class suburban aesthetic on the cusp of the Kennedy era.
What Works Well: Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain are both in fine form, and infuse Celine and Alice with enough ambiguities to initially sustain a mystery thick with opaque motivations and insidious manipulations. The costumes and hairstyles admirably evoke a chic middle-class suburban aesthetic on the cusp of the Kennedy era.
What Does Not Work As Well: The plot progresses on a straight trajectory towards preposterous, leaning hard against subtlety until it suddenly does not. The script raises questions about childhood trauma, motherhood, loss, friendship, and mental health, but miserably fails to actually probe any of the themes, settling instead for a boorish final act unworthy of Hathaway and Chastain. The supporting characters behind the two leads are relegated to irrelevant.
Key Quote:
Alice (to her husband): You think I'm imagining things?
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