A psychologist is treating a serial rapist and starts to be receptive to his manipulations and even has fantasies about being raped, and then that happens in the end. The film is exactly going where you expect it to go, which makes it utterly boring to watch. There is certainly tension as you don't want it to happen and Kenzari is great in this film by Halina Reijn - scary and dangerous. But as an audience you're put in this abhorrent position and you just don't want to watch it any further. Rape and fantasies about rape are probably artistic hip subject matters. We've seen this before, like in Irreversible, which I would call mind pollution, as it is there just to impress the audience: look what I dare to show you - all for a quite empty artistic statement. Or like in Happiness, where we had to be part of a child rapist practices. Happiness is full of masterly scenes and ideas, but the child rapist part is really abhorrent. Instinct suffers from too many cliches, mediocre or even uncredible scenes. The dog in her bed felt like a filmschool solution. The psychologist joining him in the dunes - really? Carice tries to perform her well, but the script is so uncredible and superficial that even Carice cannot entirely convince. And a 40-year-old psychologist lying in bed intimately with her mother half naked?? That was an artistically low point in the film. Instinct sends us away with the message: men are manipulative and try to overpower women, and us women are weak and dependent. We need to draw a line and the only way is to trick them into prison. Well, how groundbreaking! Instinct had a mixed reception, but the ones that gave this film five stars out of five didn't look behind the curtain.

Yes there is the cliche of the bad boy with a soft side (anyone reading this I also like bunnies/rabbits and I'm available at this very moment) - and then there are even more cliches of women falling for them. No matter their profession, standing in life and/or their respective job.

But this is a bit different - it goes directions you may not expect this to go. Especially the end third is way disturbing on so many different levels. Yet the way the two main characters play it, is more than intriguing - no pun intended. I'm not sure if there are translation issues, I watched it original with subtitles, but I can say that it is a visual movie and one that lives with what the bodies of those involved tell us (do not expect too much nudity or sexual situations). There is one in particula that was quite baffling to me, because it didn't make much sense (a bunny pose from Carice) ... but it is refreshing to see that this is not as predictable as some other movies with similar themes.

Director Halina Reijn is a great name in the Amsterdam theater-scene, and this is the first film she directed herself.

Technically 'Instinct' is a well-made film, without being brilliant. However, its storyline is feminist: a female prison-psychiatrist has an off-and-on relationship with a male prisoner. He is imprisoned for heavy sexual crimes, and you won't be surprised to hear that she wins in the end.

Another feature of Reijn's feminism: 'Instinct' heavily emphasizes on the many changing moods betweem him & her. With the result that you watch for 1,5 hours a story that could easily have been told in 20 minutes.