‘Other Mommy’ review: Jessica Chastain can’t save this chaotic horror flick
Courtesy of Universal
Jessica Chastain just can’t seem to stay away from movies about mothers confronting some form of domestic nightmare. From “Mama” to “Mothers’ Instinct” and now “Other Mommy,” the Oscar winner has carved out a rather peculiar niche for herself, although her commitment to the material has rarely been in question. That remains true of Rob Savage’s latest supernatural chiller, which gives Chastain another opportunity to flex her dramatic muscles while indulging in some deliciously sinister theatrics. Unfortunately, the movie surrounding her is nowhere near as assured. Adapted by Nathan Elston from Josh Malerman’s novel “Incidents Around the House,” “Other Mommy” has a few clever tricks up its sleeve, including a terrific title-card reveal and some inventive excursions through seemingly ordinary spaces turned into nightmarish labyrinths. Yet for all the ingenuity Savage brings to the proceedings, his film is so preoccupied with finding the next elaborate way to frighten us that it neglects the fractured family at the center of its story. The result is a horror movie overflowing with ideas but struggling to make much of anything stick.
If you find yourself wondering whether “Other Mommy” is some distant, live-action cousin to “Coraline,” you wouldn’t be entirely off base. Both stories involve a young girl being courted by a mysterious maternal figure who promises something her actual home life cannot provide. Here, that child is 7-year-old Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark), whose seemingly ordinary existence has been disrupted by an entity she affectionately calls Other Mommy. The creature bears an unsettling resemblance to Bela’s mother, Ursula (Chastain), a career-driven woman whose marriage to her stay-at-home husband, Russell (Jay Duplass), has apparently seen better days. There are hints of resentment and emotional distance between the couple, although the screenplay remains frustratingly vague about the circumstances of their deteriorating relationship. Bela might not have the vocabulary to articulate what is happening between her parents, but she can certainly sense that something isn’t right. It’s within that uncertainty that Other Mommy begins to make herself comfortable, offering the young girl a companionship that feels increasingly dangerous the more we learn about it.
Savage understands the unnerving possibilities of that relationship, particularly when he allows the creature’s appearance to do most of the heavy lifting. Other Mommy looks and sounds familiar enough to pass for Ursula, but there’s something deeply unnatural about her exaggerated smile, vacant expression, and the occasional tear running down an otherwise motionless face. Chastain has a ball with these moments, finding an uncomfortable middle ground between maternal affection and outright menace. Savage, meanwhile, makes excellent use of wide-angle lenses and invasive close-ups that distort familiar surroundings and suggest a household slowly losing its grip on reality. There are stretches where the film’s visual language is considerably more interesting than anything its characters have to say, and when Savage trusts an image to generate discomfort rather than manufacturing another jolt, “Other Mommy” shows flashes of the genuinely disturbing movie it might have been.
The trouble begins when Savage starts piling one supernatural encounter on top of another without establishing a convincing sense of escalation. A particularly claustrophobic sequence inside a playground slide gives way to an increasingly bizarre series of detours, including a sprawling mansion and the sudden involvement of paranormal investigators who seem to have wandered in from an entirely different movie. Individually, some of these sequences are impressively staged, and Savage certainly knows how to turn an innocuous location into a playground for terror. Collectively, however, they feel less like chapters of a developing nightmare than competing ideas fighting for attention. Rather than allowing the mystery surrounding Other Mommy to deepen organically, the screenplay keeps expanding its mythology while offering little insight into the rules governing it. Characters arrive with convenient explanations, new threats materialize whenever the story needs another burst of energy, and potentially meaningful revelations are hurried along before their implications have a chance to register.
There is, of course, something to be said for leaving a supernatural presence unexplained. Horror has long benefited from the fear of what cannot be understood, and Other Mommy doesn’t necessarily need an elaborate origin story to be frightening. But there’s a difference between preserving mystery and withholding the information necessary to understand what is at stake. By the time the film begins, Bela and the entity have already established a relationship, communicating through hushed conversations and secret nighttime encounters. We’re essentially dropped into the middle of their strange friendship without much opportunity to understand how it developed or why Bela has become such an important target. Other Mommy’s desire to gain access to the child’s heart is central to the story, yet the screenplay never sufficiently explores what makes Bela vulnerable beyond the broad suggestion that her parents are emotionally distracted. The film wants us to recognize the danger of a child seeking comfort from something that only pretends to love her, but it rarely does the necessary groundwork to make that temptation convincing.
That lack of emotional clarity becomes especially frustrating because the movie occasionally stumbles upon something worth exploring. One of its more effective passages finds Bela and Russell communicating through oversized building blocks at a Chuck E. Cheese-like entertainment center. It’s a small, unexpectedly tender moment that briefly suggests a more compelling direction for the story, one concerned with the difficulty parents face trying to understand a child’s inner world. Bela is navigating emotions and experiences that her parents cannot fully comprehend, while Russell struggles to bridge the distance between them. There’s a potentially affecting horror movie somewhere in that disconnect, particularly when an outside presence is exploiting the very insecurities her parents have failed to recognize. Unfortunately, Savage barely allows the scene to settle before moving on to the next supernatural complication.
The arrival of Karen Allen as Bela’s estranged grandmother only reinforces the sense that we’re watching a film with more narrative threads than it knows how to manage. Her strained relationship with Ursula introduces another generation of familial resentment, suggesting that the dysfunction threatening Bela might be part of a much longer cycle. It’s an intriguing development, especially in a movie so explicitly concerned with motherhood and the anxieties surrounding parental responsibility, but the screenplay does little to integrate that history into its larger argument. Instead, Allen becomes another piece of an increasingly crowded puzzle, arriving late enough that her character’s significance feels more suggested than earned. The movie eventually circles around to the idea that parenthood is an imperfect undertaking, that loving a child doesn’t automatically equip someone with the answers to every problem, and that even well-intentioned parents can overlook what their children desperately need. Those are worthwhile ideas, but “Other Mommy” seems more interested in announcing them than examining how they have shaped the people we’re watching.
None of this is to suggest that Savage has lost his touch behind the camera. The filmmaker responsible for “Host” and “Dashcam” remains a resourceful visual stylist, and his ability to manipulate confined spaces is put to good use throughout. There’s an impressive fluidity to the way the action travels between rooms, across locations, and even through a ball pit, transforming environments associated with childhood innocence into something considerably more threatening. The practical effects are equally commendable, particularly during a gruesome death sequence that veers into the kind of grotesque bodily destruction one might associate with David Cronenberg. Savage knows how to stage a memorable kill, and the film’s more outrageous moments suggest a director eager to push the boundaries of what this material can accommodate. The problem is that technical ingenuity can only compensate for so much when the story connecting those set pieces feels so haphazardly assembled.
Chastain, at least, appears to understand exactly what kind of movie she’s making. Her demonic creation, complete with grotesque grins and theatrical flourishes, would make one hell of an addition to Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights. It’s a performance that embraces the material’s more ridiculous tendencies without sacrificing the inherent menace of a mother whose familiar face has become something unrecognizable. Clark also deserves credit for anchoring the film through Bela’s perspective, even when the screenplay struggles to give her emotional journey a consistent trajectory. The performances are rarely the issue. Rather, it’s the disconnect between the actors’ efforts to establish a believable family and a narrative that keeps dragging them through increasingly outlandish circumstances.
For all its crafty staging, disturbing imagery, and occasional bursts of inspiration, “Other Mommy” never quite delivers on the promise of its unsettling premise or its terrific first trailer. Savage can conjure an effective image and orchestrate a nasty surprise, but the movie has remarkably little patience for the quieter moments that might have made those scares more consequential. The most frightening possibility here isn’t simply that a monster wants to replace Bela’s mother, but that a child might willingly embrace that replacement because the people who love her have become too consumed by their own problems to notice what’s happening. That’s a chilling foundation for a story about the fragility of family, and one that deserves considerably more attention than it receives. Instead, “Other Mommy” settles for a chaotic procession of supernatural encounters that become increasingly difficult to care about, no matter how creatively they’re staged. Chastain gives it everything she’s got, and Savage occasionally finds something genuinely unnerving amid the madness, but neither can rescue a movie that mistakes constant activity for mounting dread. For a horror film with so much happening, it’s remarkable how little of it manages to linger once the lights come up.
Grade: C-
OTHER MOMMY is now playing in theaters.
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