It’s an inauspicious start for Jude and Mina. Trying to use a toilet in a Chinese restaurant, she finds herself locked in with her future husband and his explosive bowels. Saverio Costanzo opens Hungry Hearts with a slice of broad comedy but don’t go getting the wrong idea. The road ahead is an increasingly dark one. The strangers become partners who become husband and wife and then mother and father to a child that Mina’s mental deterioration and increasingly extreme parenting views threaten the life of. It’s a chilling idea let down by Costanzo’s insistence on trying to be all things to all people.
Adam Driver and Alba Rohrwacher are put through their paces early on in the lead roles. Costanzo, who also wrote the screenplay, throws them into a series of scenes that act as an extended montage of their whole relationship. After the restaurant toilet they’re lying in bed together discussing her impending transfer. She’s an Italian working in the embassy in New York; he’s an engineer. Clearly he talks her out of it because soon they’re married, heading through pregnancy, giving birth and then back home with the child. Both actors scramble well to keep up with the changes.
Mina is worryingly thin from the start but it’s not until the pregnancy that she starts to exhibit signs of mental illness. She starts to believe she has a special child and insists they stay away from doctors’ and their poisons while feeding him no meat and a concoction of weird natural supplements. Jude worries but still goes along with it, only taking action when it’s clear the child is suffering. He’s literally starving, threatening physical and mental development.
From here, Costanza struggles with Mina. He can’t seem to decide if he wants a character study of an ill woman and the impact this has on her child and family, or an unhinged monster from the world of psychological horror. He tries both and fails to find either. Mina’s erratic behaviour and Jude’s attempts to go around her and get their son help are met with musical cues straight out a Hammer horror but when it comes time to let her step forward, she’s given little more than an acknowledgement that she’s not a well woman.
This tense register at least feels more suitable than the whirlwind relationship witnessed at the start. In particular, the longer Hungry Hearts goes on, the more incongruous that opening bathroom meeting comes to seem. When Mina is forcing oils down her child that prevent him from absorbing nutrients or holding forth on crackpot theories, it seems like a different film. As if he hasn’t jumped around enough already, Costanzo introduces Jude’s mother Anne (Roberta Maxwell) for a rushed and definitive finale.
Hungry Hearts contains strong performances and an intriguingly odd premise that ultimately comes to little, squandered instead by Costanzo’s refusal to accept that he can’t have it all.
Director: Saverio Costanzo
Writers: Marco Franzoso (novel), Saverio Costanzo (screenplay)
Stars: Adam Driver, Alba Rohrwacher, Roberta Maxwell
Runtime: 109 min
Country: Italy
Film Rating: 
