After some pretty damning suspicions, Mother's Instinct's ending features a shocking twist that will leave audiences slack-jawed.
The 2024 thriller from renowned screenwriter Benoît Delhomme stars Anne Hathaway and Take Shelter's Jessica Chastain is now streaming on Hulu, following two feeding mothers as one gets a little too close to the other's family.
The film was originally released in theaters in July 2024, earning a middling 53% on Rotten Tomatoes and a paltry $3.4 million at the global box office.
How Does Mother's Instinct End?
Mother's Instinct is a story of anger, revenge, and consequences for one's actions, all themes of which come to a head in its mind-blowing ending.
The film is led by two powerhouse performances by Anne Hathaway (who starred in another controversial 2024 movie, The Idea of You) and Jessica Chastain as two mothers Celine and Alice.
It follows the two maternal figures in 1960 America as two next-door neighbors who become intertwined in each other's lives thanks to their two pre-teen sons.
A Death in the Family
The movie kicks off following the events of a neighborly surprise party Alice throws for Celine. The day after the party Alice is witness to the death of Celine's son, Max, starting a long string of accusations that slowly snowball into an all-out meltdown between the two friends.
As Celine vacuums her house, Alice catches Max playing recklessly on the family's balcony. Trying to stop the young boy from hurting himself, Alice attempts to sneak through a hole in the fence between the properties to hopefully get there in time and avoid any dire consequences.
She, however, cannot fit through the fence and is forced to go all the way around, arriving at Celine's door just as Max tumbles from the balcony to his death. Following the death of her son, Celine removes herself from Alice's life.
How Did She Fit This Time?
Over this time, Celine begins to grow close to Alice's son Theo. With Max gone, Celine is searching for that mother-son bond she once had, and Theo is the closest thing she can find to that.
This causes some strain between Celine and Alice, but they ultimately remain amicable — that is, until the balcony from earlier comes back into play. Playing on the balcony while over at Celine's, Theo does exactly as Max did, reaching a bit too far from its ledge and putting his life at risk.
However, this time, Alice (who catches Theo playing on the balcony just like Max before) forces herself through the hole in the fence between the properties, saving Theo from what would have almost certainly been a fatal injury had he fallen.
This raises suspicions from Hathaway's Celine. How was it that Chastain's Alice was able to make it over through the fence hole when it was her own son in danger, but could not when it was Max?
Alice meanwhile thinks the incident may have been a test by Celine to see if she was perhaps the one to blame for Max's fatal fall.
Things Get Messy Fast
This second balcony incident sets off a series of tragedies between the two families.
With Celine and Theo's relationship closer than ever, the young boy invites Hathaway's character to his birthday party. Everything at the party goes as expected, with nothing too out of the ordinary occurring.
The next day, however, Alice's mother-in-law suddenly succumbs to a heart attack, collapsing on the floor dead in their living room. The elderly lady (played by Caroline Lagerfelt) had been taking heart medication for some time to that point, but something seemed to have gone wrong with her pills, resulting in her death.
After an autopsy, it is revealed to Alice that no trace of the medication was found in her bloodstream, making her suspect that in her visits to see Theo, Celine had been possibly replacing the meds with a placebo to enact her revenge for Max.
While she has her suspicions about Celine, Alice fails to find any meaningful evidence proving she was behind her mother-in-law's death.
Alice's worries about Hathaway's character are pushed even further when Theo is hospitalized at one point in the movie, after suffering a severe allergic reaction thanks to some food.
Alice believes it was again Celine behind this, believing that Celine forced the young boy to eat something he was allergic to, again, in an act of revenge.
Believing it was Celine to both killed her mother-in-law and caused Theo's hospitalization, Alice ventures into Celine's home to hopefully gather some evidence. She does this but is ultimately forced out by Celine who catches her in the act.
A Blood-Soaked Ending
Akin to a movie like In a Violent Nature (read more about In a Violent Nature's shocking ending here), Mother's Instinct comes to a bloody conclusion.
As Alice and her husband Simon (played by Anders Danielsen Lie) contemplate moving away from Celine, as they fear what she might do to their family, they are forced to come to her aid.
Celine arrives at their front door crying, with her husband seemingly dead. While his death was made to look like a suicide, audiences look on as Celine slices his wrists and leaves him for dead to set up her final plan of revenge against Alice.
Alice and Simon take Celine in to hopefully console the traumatized housewife. They tell Celine that she can stay with them as long as she needs and that she is safe there.
Alice then heads off to gather the rest of Celine's belongings from the house next door. While Alice is away though, that is when Celine strikes. She sedated both Theo and Simon, waiting for Alice to return.
As Alice comes back from Celine's, she discovers what has happened, causing the two characters to finally have it out with each other, voicing all the accusations that had been building to that point.
Celine does not prevail here, but she starts a gas leak which eventually, sedates and kills both Alice and Simon.
The movie then ends by showing Celine living her life with Theo as her new adopted son, finally enacting revenge on the person she thought was responsible for the death of her son while filling the void left in Max's wake following his death.
Mother's Instinct is now streaming on Hulu.
