To hear it from Variety‘s Jay Weissberg, Saverio Costanzo’s Hungry Hearts goes nuts around the midway point. Pic does engagingly enough when focusing on the beginnings of a serious relationship between the spirited Adam Driver and the nowhere-near-hot-enough Alba Rohrwacher, but when a baby comes along…look out.

As things turn weird and then malevolent, “viewers will begin to notice all the absences,” Weissberg notes. “The lack of friends, the fact that Mina doesn’t have a job, or that Jude never seems to be at his. Jude’s deferral to Mina’s peculiarities, at the risk of his son’s life, beggars belief, given how long it takes before he wakes up, and the ending is especially disappointing.

“It’s as if the director can’t decide what he wants: to chronicle the disintegration of a family, or to take a magnifying glass to a woman whose mania overwhelms all rational thought. At least in Rosemary’s Baby, Rosemary really has been inseminated by the Devil, making her desperation and seeming madness terrifying to watch, whereas here, Mina’s delusion and Jude’s initial lack of backbone feel merely ridiculous.”