Hungry Hearts is an odd and at times unwieldy film, but also an extremely disquieting and hypnotic one. It has the most misleading opening sequence imaginable: engineer Jude (Adam Driver) and Italian transplant Mina (Alba Rohrwacher) are briefly held captive in the restroom of a Chinese restaurant when the door will not open. He is nervous. She is aloof. They call for help. They laugh. They warm to one another. Romantic comedy, right? Wrong. The next few cuts jump forward in time. They sleep together. She decides to stay with him in America rather than move with her job. She is pregnant. They wed. The film reveals its true nature during her pregnancy. She briefly believes the baby may be an "Indigo child," a New Age conception of a special or even supernatural being. She abhors hospitals and their technology, longing instead for a natural alternative. Her troubled nature only intensifies once their son is born. She rigidly controls his diet to the point of stunting growth, and she refuses to let him outside. Frightened and hesitant, Jude tries to respect his wife's belief system while also championing his ailing son, but the situation grows more and more volatile as the months go by.

It is a horror story for the anti-vaccination generation.

This film in general is vastly indebted to vintage Roman Polanski, particularly Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby. The slowly mounting, ambiguity-centric suspense is largely derived from the claustrophobia of the apartment where much of the action unfolds; as Jude and Mina spiral further into crisis, many scenes are shot with a depth-and-space-contorting fish-eye lens, turning their domestic sphere into a type of nauseating madhouse. It is, to be honest, a rather heavy-handed exaggeration of Polanski's confined-places cinema, but the impact (the creep factor) is undeniable. And the lead performances are both strong. Driver, known for his comic-and-neurotic screen presence, slips easily into a more dramatic role, nicely playing the character's gradual evolution from guarded, sincere concern to near frenzy. And Rohrwacher is downright wrenching, exuding a frightening blend of derangement and parental exhaustion. The flayed-nerve nature of her turn, both on physical and emotional levels, almost matches Charlotte Gainsbourg's bold and searing submission to Lars von Trier's vision in Antichrist.

B+