User Reviews

Celine and Alice are affluent next door neighbours, best friends, and each has a son: they are also best friends. Celine's son dies in an accident: does she blame Alice? Anne Hathaway is Celine and Jessica Chastain is Alice.

The first half of this movie is very good stuff. The introduction is an exercise in exposition: it does the job slickly and quickly. Then, after the accident, the depiction of how everyone deals with grief in the context of their own relationships is complex, painful and entirely convincing.

Then the movie enters psychological thriller territory. Is Celine up to nefarious shenanigans? Is it just her dealing with her grief? Or is Alice manifesting unnamed issues which she apparently suffered from in the past?

This second part is a good deal less convincing than the first part, and is fairly disappointing by comparison with the start. We've seen it a hundred times, even if we're not sure how it's going to play out.

Just got out of a Mothers' Instinct Screening.

It was Literally Perfect....... the Script was Firing and Working, the Sheer Paranoia of Alice and the Projected Shadiness(by Alice) on to Celine was Working so well as a Juxtaposition.

And built this Literal Rabbit Hole of Paranoia & Delusion playing on screen. It was such an excellent Watch......and then it Makes an Absolutely Disastrous Script Choice.

So here I am, sitting in the Cinema, I've just Watched that Excellent Balcony Scene with Alice, Celine and Theo and thinking "Man, this is a Perfect Watch".

We then get to the part where Celine and Alice are Having Cigarettes 🚬, Sitting Down and Smoking and Making Up and Forgiving eachother and I then thought to myself -

• "This is the Film, a Film about Paranoia, Delusion, Bad energy and that these 3 things Destroy People Around Us, and Especially Harms the Kids around us seeing this stuff"

• "That's it, End the Film Here, it's Perfect (add a slow pan out shot and fade to black)."

BUT NO! We get, in my opinion, an Absolute Domino Effect of a Disaster. It's not that the actual Films Ending didn't work, it's the fact that it was a weak as hell execution, Due to the fact that this Pathways' Ending wasn't built up strongly enough in that Direction to end at a Resolution like this.

Even when films are based on Novels, either build things properly to produce effective outcomes or make amendments to the script.

Anyway, Here's the Positives -

1. 👩‍💼👱Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastains Acting Ability was Top Notch. Correct Lack of Facial expressions/Facial Expressions at the right moments expressing that Given Emotion, Dialogue, Line Delivery, the Chemistry they had as Best Friends, everything. The Supporting Husbands and the 2 Kids were Fine.

2.👗Costume Design, Make-up and Hair, Perfectly done for the Time Period.

3. 🍭Production Design and Props, again, Matching the Time Period.

4. 🎵 Score, once again, Matches the Film Perfectly and is Used effectively at the Correct Moments

5. 🎥 Cinematography, Gorgeous Cinematography Coupling the Production Design and Colour Grading. It has this Bright Sheen to it. Beautiful to Watch.

Overall, it was a 10/10......and then Drops to a 7/10 roughly a little bit after the cigarette/Forgiveness Scene up to the Ending.

Really enjoyed it till the ending, it was probably an 8/10 most of the way through. Then the last 15 minutes the rest of the film goes out the window.

Before this it was enjoyable, great acting all around. You aren't quite sure which of the two leads to believe, who's nuts and who's not. By the time you find out there are so many plot holes popping up that you start to laugh. For example the blonde housewife all of a sudden panically checks the medicine cabinet of her neighbour (why all of a sudden panicked? She wanted to go in there and check before anyway) then when she does, OMG - once box of chloroform - her husband worked for a pharma company, couldn't that be relatively normal? It wasn't a huge quanitity?

Anyway even this aside the ending was pretty disappointing 😢

I watched the trailer for this film a couple of times in the cinema, I didn't realise it was a remake of a Belgian film, which I was unable to find to watch before; Mark Kermode gave this film a relatively positive review while the Radio Times which gave it 2 out of 5, I decided to watch it and make my own mind up. Basically, set in the 1960s, in the American suburbs, Alice (Jessica Chastain, also producing) and Celine (Anne Hathaway, also producing) are next-door neighbours and mothers with sons of a similar age. Alice and Celine's friends and family stage a surprise birthday party for her. There are tensions between Alice and her husband Simon (Anders Danielsen Lie) during the party, and that night, she tells him she wants to go back to work as a journalist. She also suggests that they should have another child together; Celine cannot have any more children. The next day, Celine's son Max (Baylen D. Bielitz) is unwell and stays home from school. Alice is pruning the roses in the garden when she sees Max in a precarious position on the balustrade of the upper balcony trying to reach a birdhouse. Alice tries to crawl through the hedge but is forced to run around it to alert Celine of the danger. Alice runs upstairs, but neither she nor Celine get there quick enough, and Max falls off the balcony to his death. Alice feels guilty for not saving Max, and Celine appears to be distancing herself from her, perhaps blaming her for the accident. Alice notices Celine growing closer to her son Theo (Eamon Patrick O'Connell), who feels lost without his friend to play with. Alice finds solace in spending time with Theo, while her husband Damien (Josh Charles) has become depressed. At Max's funeral, Theo notices his treasured bunny rabbit toy has been placed in Max's coffin and lashes out. Celine apologises to Theo for taking the toy, and although she returns it, Alice has suspicions about her actions. A month later, Celine returns from an unknown location (possibly a mental hospital) and reconciles with Alice. Theo grows even closer to Celine. One day, Alice panics when she sees Theo on the same balcony next-door but manages to crawl through the hedge. Celine appears up there with him but is confused by Alice's reaction, and Alice is shocked and angered by her calmness. The following day, Alice questions Celine if she was testing her, but Celine makes her feel guilty for insinuating this. Theo has become so close to Celine that he invites her to his birthday party, much to Alice's disdain. The party goes normally, but Simon's mother Jean (Caroline Lagerfelt) talks to Celine, suggesting she should avoid anything that might remind her of Max. When Jean next visits, she suddenly collapses and dies of a heart attack. Paranoid that Celine was present at the time of death, she requests an autopsy from Dr. Wallace (Alexander Blaise), without Damien's knowledge. The autopsy reveals that there was no heart medication in Jean's system. Alice suspects that Celine tampered with Jean's medication but cannot find proof. Alice's suspicions increase when Theo is taken to hospital after a severe allergic reaction at Celine's house. Alice believes that Celine deliberately encouraged Theo to eat cookies, which he is allergic to. When Alice sees Celine leaving her house, she decides to sneak in to try to find evidence of her tampering with the drugs, but Celine catches her and orders her to leave. Alice tells Simon about everything she has noticed and mentions the autopsy without his permission. But Alice has had mental issues in the past, Simon is convinced that these issues are resurfacing, he does not believe her and suggests she should see a psychiatrist. Alice tells Simon that she wants to move away, after everything that has happened surrounding Celine. But Theo threatens to take his own life in response to their arguing and they try to reconcile as Alice admits she must be imagining things. However, later that night, Celine is seen killing her own husband, sedating him with chloroform, and slicing his wrist, making it look like a suicide. Despite the tension between them, Alice and Simon allow a seemingly distraught Celine to stay with them. Alice and Celine appear to reconcile talking things through. But when Alice decides to go next door to gather Celine's belongings, Celine sedates Simon and Theo. Alice finds evidence of Celine's twisted motives, including the chloroform, and races back. She and Celine fight, with Celine overpowering Alice and sedating her. Alice and Simon are killed when Celine disconnects a boiler to make it look like an accidental gas leak. She avoids the gas herself and spares Theo by barricading herself in his bedroom with the window open. In the end, Celine adopts Theo, and the two are happy together spending a fay at the beach. Also starring T. L. Flint as Officer, Steve Routman as Medical Examiner, Joel Nagle as Attorney, Scott Robertson as Judge, and Larry Petersen as Pastor. Chastain as the highly paranoid neighbour and Hathaway as the obsessive woman with a warped mind both give credible performances, I can see the comparison to a Hitchcockian psychodrama, with emotions running high and the "potboiler" plot building up with paranoia, anxiety and silent hatred increasing between the two women, I agree it gets a bit too ludicrous by the end, but you cannot help but want to know where it is going, and the costumes and period detail is terrific, it is a glossy and tense enough psychological thriller. Worth watching!