Earlier this year, before screenings of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, a trailer for Universal Pictures’ next film played – Other Mommy, a horror film starring Jessica Chastain. This trailer snuck up on audiences, because for the first half of the trailer, this didn’t look like an advertisement for a horror film at all, and then things get super intense and ominous. And this trailer totally got me interested, so much that I decided to read the book that served as the basis for this story – Incidents Around the House by Josh Malerman, before seeing the film. I wasn’t crazy about Incidents for reasons I’ll get into, but in my opinion it stuck the landing and ended very well. I had to temper my expectations for Rob Savage’s Other Mommy when I saw that Universal had decided not to screen the film for critics ahead of its release, a thing studios usually do when they have a surefire stinker on their hands.
So, imagine my disappointment when I left Other Mommy on Friday afternoon not overly dismayed or repulsed, but instead with an unmoved shoulder shrug. Other Mommy is not an irrefutable disaster, but it’s also not even remotely close to good. It often flirts with competence, but never knows which parts of itself to take seriously and which to play with a self-aware wink. Incidents Around the House was a book I didn’t like very much, but had some ideas I thought might translate to film well. That doesn’t happen. A book I found repetitive and kind of grating turns into a movie that isn’t doing much of anything.
7-year-old Bela Martin (Arabella Olivia Clark) lives with her high-powered executive ‘mommy’ Ursula (Jessica Chastain) and stay-at-home ‘daddo’ Russ (Jay Duplass), and is by all accounts a very happy little girl. But her parents will soon learn Bela’s life isn’t all it seems. She’s been visited for years by ‘Other Mommy’, an evil supernatural entity that lives in her closet that can take on the appearance of anyone or anything, but most often takes the form of her own mother, who’s supposed to represent warmth and safety for her. Other Mommy repeatedly asks Bela ‘Can I go into your heart?’ and Bela’s starting to understand the horrific implications of what she means. And her parents must figure out how to put an end to Other Mommy before it’s too late.
I’m not sure what exactly went so wrong with Other Mommy. Rob Savage is a horror filmmaker who’s yet to really have a film that’s stuck with me. There are really memorable aspects about films like the Covid-era Host, Dashcam and even The Boogeyman, but Savage hasn’t figured out how to create something with staying power, and this is frustrating to me. Incidents Around the House shouldn’t have been a hard book to adapt, and because I felt like the book was too long, I was enticed by Other Mommy’s brief 90-minute runtime. Therein lies one of its biggest problems, however. Everything in this film feels hurried and underwhelming, like it was hacked up in the editing process. Moments don’t land like they should, the CGI creature effects are almost laughably bad, and everything feels very rushed. And perhaps worst of all, the film wastes a golden opportunity to give Jessica Chastain more chances to lean into absurdity and camp. Instead, the film lifelessly flails, lingering on the screen waiting to die.
Jessica Chastain is an Oscar winner, an actress I thought had the kind of clout to be more selective about the projects she takes on. And perhaps this looked better on the page, or maybe she read the book and had some fun ideas about what she could do with this material. Unfortunately her efforts are undermined in almost every moment. The film could have presented a chance for her to lean into the camp ingrained in this premise, to embrace the delightfully bonkers batshittery that might have flowed through her in the sequences where she’s playing the evil Other Mommy. But unfortunately a lot of that part of the performance is covered by some hideous CGI that calls to mind the most generic monster movie tropes. There’s a moment early on where half of Other Mommy’s face suddenly begins to droop and I got excited, thinking we’d be going for Death Becomes Her vibes. Sadly, the film peaks at that opening sequence (also the aforementioned teaser trailer) and the film doesn’t really do anything like that again.
Jay Duplass plays Russ, Ursula’s oblivious but kind-hearted husband, and he’s fine if not particularly memorable. Child actress Arabella Olivia Clark really has to carry this thing, she’s in just about every scene. Clark manages to find a good balance in her performance, of the precocious child who’s dealing with something no one her age should have to. Clark really makes you feel for her, and doesn’t go too overboard on the precocious child thing. It’s a tricky balance for an actor that young to achieve, but Clark manages to make it look easy. The great Karen Allen appears as Bela’s strong-willed grandmother Ruth, and she’s got a few good scenes that livened things up for a bit. And Dichen Lachman appears as a paranormal investigator called in when things get serious, and I feel like she could have been given more to do.
The technical aspects aren’t really anything to go crazy over either. In brief moments, Patrick Jonsson’s score escalates tension effectively but like the rest of the film, it frustratingly never commits to the bit. Jeremy Woodward is our production designer, and this is also mostly unremarkable with a few exceptions, namely a horror setpiece involving a ball pit at a children’s playground and the sequence set at grandma Ruth’s house. The design of that house is exciting and looks very cool and makes me wonder why the rest of the film couldn’t have looked like that. Even the design of the family’s house, where most of the film takes place, feels lackluster.
Josh Malerman’s Incidents Around the House didn’t really work for me and the first reason why is because the book is about 370 pages long and we get multiple scenes that drive home the same point and as I made my way to the end, I started to get bored. Another reason is because the book is completely from the perspective of 8-year-old (for some reason she’s 7 in the movie) Bela. As a result, the tone feels very simplistic and cloying. But in some moments, where it’s clear young Bela isn’t fully comprehending the severity of what’s happening, it can be heartbreaking and effective. But the thing I’ll remember about Incidents is the bleak and chilling ending. It’s the kind of ending that feels like a gut punch and sticks with you. Other Mommy changes that ending entirely in favor of something more hopeful, and this was a terrible decision. It kills the one chance this film had to really leave an impression after everything mediocre that came before it, and I found this to be the most frustrating part of the entire film.
Josh Malerman is credited as an executive producer on the film, but I question how much involvement he had. Because if I’d written that book and learned they wanted to change the ending, I would want nothing to do with the project. Nathan Elston’s screenplay is trying to condense the guts of this lengthy book into the shape of a Blumhouse horror movie, and it calls to mind how inconsistent the Blumhouse track record is. In condensing this book, big sequences feel rushed through and underdeveloped. A big focus of Malerman’s book is the family drama that emerges and escalates over the course of the story, where these characters have to figure out how to deal with some personal situations that inform where the story’s going. When the film does something with this in the third act, it feels like tonal whiplash because the film hasn’t really cared about the internal lives of these characters up until then, so why did they start in the last ten minutes? More than anything it felt jarring.
Other Mommy fails as an adaptation of a horror novel that isn’t great, but had cool ideas that could have been expanded upon in a feature film. It’s frustrating that the film is never really doing anything with the opportunities presented to it, but also because this adaptation should not have been this hard to get right. It’s a bummer to see the great Jessica Chastain seemingly presented with a chance to go full scream queen, and then to see that chance ripped away from her as the film goes on. And with the changed ending, the film becomes an unremarkable and forgettable way to pass time instead of a horror story that could have dug its claws into your soul and stayed there.
