There’s a certain brand of European cinema that fancies itself immune to subtlety, allergic to plot, and utterly obsessed with the human psyche in distress — like Bergman dropped his camera into a sewer and handed it to a horny grad student. Instinct (2019), the directorial debut of Dutch actress Halina Reijn, is that film. It tries to be a provocative psychological thriller, but ends up feeling like a half-baked sexual harassment training video produced by Lars von Trier during a heat stroke.
Starring Carice van Houten — yes, the Red Woman from Game of Thrones who here trades fire gods for Freud — Instinctis the kind of movie that wants to claw at taboos and tangle with moral ambiguity, but instead just sort of fondles them awkwardly like a teenager on prom night. The premise is seductive: Van Houten plays Nicoline, a seasoned psychologist at a correctional facility for violent sex offenders. Her latest patient? Idris, a convicted rapist played by Marwan Kenzari (aka Hot Jafar), who’s been deemed rehabilitated and is on the verge of supervised release. Naturally, Nicoline develops a sexual fascination with him, because the script needs somewhere to go and “ethics” is apparently a dirty word in Dutch.
Now, let’s be clear. This is not a movie about healing, justice, or the criminal mind. This is a movie about two beautiful people pretending they’re broken while slow music plays and soft lighting bathes everything like a Nivea ad. Reijn wants you to squirm, to feel complicit, to question your own instincts (see what I did there?). But what you’ll really be questioning is how this movie got past the first draft.
Nicoline is written like a grab bag of neuroses: emotionally vacant, professionally reckless, and possessed by a libido that shows up at the worst times, like a drunk uncle at a baptism. We’re told she’s competent, experienced, and respected — then immediately shown her ignoring boundaries, chasing a patient through the hallways like she’s auditioning for a Fifty Shades of Grey reboot filmed in a maximum-security wing.
Meanwhile, Idris is supposed to be this enigmatic predator: charming, manipulative, dripping with latent danger. In reality, he’s more like a hot guy doing his best Hannibal Lecter impression after watching The Silence of the Lambs once on an airplane. He smirks, he broods, he monologues about dominance — and yet, somehow, he’s about as threatening as a cologne commercial.
What unfolds between them is a slow-burn psychosexual game of cat and mouse, only the cat keeps forgetting where it left the mouse and the mouse is busy masturbating in the break room. Tension is teased, but never earned. Instead, we get scene after scene of these two circling each other like underpaid ballet dancers in a doomed romance set to the soundtrack of an elevator slowly giving up the will to live.
Reijn wants to say something big — about control, about trauma, about the hidden violence in professional intimacy — but all she ends up doing is meandering through long silences, painfully vague flashbacks, and power dynamics that are about as complex as a drunken arm-wrestling match. Nicoline’s descent into obsession is framed as bold, daring, unflinching — but mostly it just feels like malpractice filmed in 4K.
By the third act, any shred of believability is chucked out the window like a patient file during a fire drill. Nicoline stalks Idris through the prison with all the subtlety of a chainsaw. She taunts him, invites danger, blurs boundaries like a kid with crayons and no supervision. The film wants you to ask, “Is she in control, or is he?” but the real question is: “Who’s writing this dialogue and why are they allowed near a camera?”
The cinematography is slick, I’ll give it that. The institutional beige of the prison is almost pretty, the sterile hallways bathed in a kind of melancholic light that screams “prestige drama.” But no amount of ambient light or tasteful framing can disguise the fact that this movie has nothing to say. It fakes depth the way a guy in a coffee shop fakes interest in your poetry — all nods and knowing looks, but dead behind the eyes.
And then there’s the ending. Without spoiling too much, let’s just say it tries to be bold, but lands somewhere between “huh?” and “wait, that’s it?” It’s like watching a firework that fizzles halfway up — all the setup, none of the bang. Reijn seems to think ambiguity equals profundity, but in this case, it just feels like someone forgot to finish their thought.
Carice van Houten deserves better. She brings a rawness to Nicoline that almost saves the film, but not quite. You can see her trying to find a real person in the mess of contradiction she’s been handed, but it’s like acting inside a fog machine — eventually you just get lost. Kenzari, for his part, does his best brooding predator routine, but with a script this thin, all he can really do is glower and occasionally toss out lines like, “You want to be dominated.”
Instinct is not erotic, it’s not insightful, and it’s certainly not thrilling. It’s the kind of film that thinks whispering about taboo subjects is the same as exploring them. It wants to seduce you, unsettle you, make you question your instincts — but mostly it just makes you wonder why the protagonist hasn’t been fired, sued, or committed.
Final Verdict:
Instinct is like a psych ward soap opera with a God complex — pretty to look at, empty in the middle, and full of ideas it doesn’t know how to execute. It flirts with danger but never commits, flashes some skin but hides all the substance. It wants to disturb you but mostly just wastes your time. If you’re looking for psychological depth, you’ll find more nuance in a karaoke rendition of “Toxic.”
In the end, it’s not a thriller. It’s a power struggle between two people who should never have been left alone in a room together — and a filmmaker who should’ve known better.
