Directed by Rob Savage, whom you may remember from Host (2020) and The Boogeyman (2023), and starring Jessica Chastain in two very different roles, Other Mommy is an exhausting experience for viewers like me who see excessive jump scares as a cheap and easy move, because there are plenty of them here. In fact, the film promises an intriguing story even for people like me who don’t particularly enjoy horror. Adapted from Josh Malerman’s novel Incidents Around the House, it tells the story of a mother driven half-mad by her work, a father who is always at home, and a lonely child caught in the middle of her parents’ problems.
Eight-year-old Bela, while dealing with the possibility of her family falling apart, also comes face to face with a strange entity that has taken on the appearance of her own mother. What’s more, this entity doesn’t differ from her real mother, Ursula, only in appearance; it also builds a deeply unsettling mother-daughter relationship through its behavior. It keeps asking Bela the same question: “Can I come into your heart?” What initially seems like a strange game belonging to the child’s world gradually turns into a nightmare that threatens the entire family.
In short, there’s a ghost in the house, my friends, so watch yourselves… And they do. Once it turns out that what Bela sees isn’t just a figment of her imagination, the family flees the house and somehow ends up at their grandmother’s place. And strangely enough, this grandmother has fought ghosts before, and even knows a whole bunch of people who work in that field. Lucky, isn’t it?
Or should we call it lazy writing? Of course, it’s perfectly natural in horror films for characters to encounter events they can’t explain and to seek help. But a character like this showing up exactly when the story needs one, and a team knowledgeable about the supernatural being so easily brought into play, feels like a slightly too convenient solution the film uses to move its own story forward. The supernatural investigation and séance that follow all this serve less to save the family than to make things go from bad to worse. Although the film tries to explain what the entity wants and how it intends to take over Bela’s place in her life, instead of deepening the psychological tension that idea creates, it steers more and more toward chaos.
From here on, the story turns into a rather ordinary chase sequence that never really grabs you by the collar. The family runs from one place to another, the entity follows them, people die, and everyone has to run again. All of this occasionally becomes quite a chaotic symphony. But the film’s real problem is less this mess itself than its constant reliance on the same trick to scare the audience. Sudden scares that might work at first lose their effect as they’re repeated and the dosage keeps escalating.
After a certain point, you’re no longer scared so much as waiting for when the next sudden noise or strange image will arrive. There’s an important difference between building tension and jumping out at the audience to make them flinch, and Other Mommy tries to substitute the latter for the former. In the end, what could have been a perfectly watchable, ordinary horror movie turns, after a certain point, into the kind of nonsense that feels like someone standing in front of you and saying “Boo!” in a completely unscary way.
Jessica Chastain, meanwhile, does the best she can while playing two opposing characters. As she works to establish the difference between the real Ursula and the entity wearing her appearance, she makes up the one side of the film that can be appreciated, at least in terms of acting. Still, Chastain’s performance isn’t enough to cancel out the film’s overall problems. The acting and the direction part ways, much like there being two of the same Ursula, one good and one bad. I suppose you can guess which one is the bad one.
