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I went into Netflix‘s Maternal Instinct with no sense of what I was about to watch. Really, I only even pulled up the screeners to stop the documentary’s third-party PR company from asking me a fifth time if I’d watched. So I went to my Preview Content hub, selected the film without so much as a thumbnail, and dove in. (Well, I did so after I got the authentication code sent to my cell phone, keyed it in… you don’t need all the details.)
Almost immediately, I regretted the decision. To be clear, that feeling is not an indictment on the quality of the film — it’s solely a reflection of the subject matter. Being a parent didn’t help matters here.
In Maternal Instinct, directed by Jessica Dimmock (HBO’s Thoughts & Prayers, Hulu’s Captive Audience) and executive produced by Liz Garbus (I”ll Be Gone in the Dark, Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer), a young woman from a wealthy family falls in love with an East Texas hog trapper. Classic girl meets boy stuff, just with a trailer full of pigs sold for slaughter. The swine are not the only ones who will be slaughtered.
“Their relationship appears perfect and within months she’s pregnant and proudly showing off her baby bump all over social media,” the film’s official synopsis reads. “But when a state trooper pulls her over and discovers she has just given birth in her car, her story quickly falls apart.”
