Hungry Hearts (2014)
Much like another 2014 film, The Babadook, Hungry Hearts delves into the flipside of beatified motherhood, although there are no supernatural boogeymen lurking in the shadows here. Unfortunately, the film falls short of being the deep exploration of a mother’s psychosis it seemingly wants to be.
Adam Driver and Alba Rohrwacher star as Jude and Mina, a young couple who have the world’s worst “meet cute”—she accidentally gets locked in the men’s restroom where Jude is having dire digestive issues—and wind up marrying after Mina gets pregnant. What starts as a romance, though, becomes a nightmare as Mina’s obsessions about the baby become increasingly dark and threatening.
Throughout the film, there are hints that maybe Mina didn’t want a child at all, from a comment she makes during sex with Jude (that he ignores) to the fact that she starts starving herself during the pregnancy. During this time, Mina consults with a psychic, who tells her she will have an “indigo child,” explained as a special child with paranormal properties. Jude ignores this as well, but he does agree to let her to seek out alternative medicine, switching from their traditional physician, Dr. Bill (Jake Weber), to Dr. Jacob (David Aaron Baker), who practices non-traditional methods, such as at-home water births.
However, even Dr. Jacob notices that Mina is underweight, and when the at-home pregnancy threatens to end badly, it’s off to the hospital where Jude okays a Caesarean, something Mina explicitly didn’t want. Between the psychic’s pronouncement and Jude and Dr. Jacob not continuing the water birth, it’s no wonder Mina feels she’s the only one capable of caring for her baby, and her obsession with keeping her son free from impurities kicks into overdrive.
After Mina and the baby stay holed up for seven months in the apartment, Jude finally takes his son back to Dr. Bill, who informs Jude that the child is malnourished and not growing properly. Jude tries to explain that Mina is vegetarian and very concerned about what the baby eats, but the simple fact is: Mina is starving herself, and she is starving the baby.
The film wants to have it both ways. It wants us to sympathize with Mina’s fragile state, while also rooting for Jude to save his son from Mina before tragedy strikes. While director Saverio Costanzo, who also wrote the screenplay based on Marco Franzoso’s novel, “Il bambino indaco” (“The Indigo Child”), seeds hints throughout that Mina is losing her mind well before Jude notices (or deals with it), he also undercuts the resulting tension with poorly staged scenes that feel like they were lifted from a ‘70s soap opera, or using techniques of characters over-explaining events that truly don’t require the exposition.
It doesn’t help that the film is set in New York City, where, even in a culture that favors the rights of the mother over the rights of the father, the authorities are going to need so much time to prove a mother is starving her child that a father would need to take the drastic measures Jude does.
The good thing about the film is the performances, particularly from Driver and Rohrwacher, who make us root for Jude and Mina even as the characters are doing frankly stupid things. Also good is Roberta Maxwell as Jude’s mother, Anne, who is a bit creepy herself.
That the situation in Hungry Hearts is going to end in tragedy is never in doubt. The real tragedy, though, is how it fails to be the intensely unsettling story it could have been.
