Nice Try, Other Mommy

Photo: Universal Pictures

The scariest moment in the new horror film Other Mommy is the one you’ve already seen, the one from the trailers with a ridiculously contorted Jessica Chastain smiling maniacally under a kitchen table. Hilarious and jarring, this image appears fairly early on in Rob Savage’s picture, and it’s an important one because it brings the movie’s monster — a murderous, supernatural doppelgänger for Chastain’s Ursula, who is the, let’s say, normal mommy of the film — into the open and away from the realm of mere projection. Everyone can see Other Mommy when she shows up. This isn’t one of those stories in which the protagonist desperately tries to convince everyone they’re being pursued by some kind of demon from beyond that no one else can see. This is one of those stories in which everybody can see the demon from beyond but doesn’t seem interested in doing anything about it. At one point, Other Mommy pursues our heroes into a giant ball pit in a public place and we see bystanders watching and freaking out, which suggests Other Mommy might be about to turn into a disaster flick. Alas, no such luck.

Beyond that, though, Other Mommy does present as a kind of secret friend/psychic projection for Bela Martin (Arabella Olivia Clark), a lonely 7-year-old who is close to her fun-loving father Russ (Jay Duplass) but barely gets to see Ursula, her workaholic mom. Lurking somewhere in the multidimensional darkness of Bela’s closet, Other Mommy promises endless love and togetherness and begs the little girl to let her into her heart so they can be one. “Sometimes I think about when you and I were one person, and it makes me so happy, I cry. Do you remember that?” Other Mommy asks. Her freakish smile strikes a sharp contrast with Ursula’s more distracted gaze. This monster is a twisted version of the ideal parent, a collection of traditional maternal impulses pushed to almost comical extremes. (That dad seems a little too mild-mannered and sheepish — read neutered — probably adds to all that bad domestic juju.) But Other Mommy’s statements of love are belied by the fact that she can also turn people into goo, tear their faces into a hundred grotesque slivers, and reduce their bodies to dust. And besides, her maternal impulses are just that: impulses. She can’t even make pasta without burning it.

As you might suspect, Other Mommy joins the ranks of horror movies rooted in women’s anxieties around motherhood. It’s clear from the beginning that Ursula’s careerism has allowed Other Mommy to take hold of Bela’s imagination, and a couple of late-breaking revelations prove that to be even more the case. Though Ursula loves her daughter, the film suggests that there are consequences for not always being keen on parenthood and for maybe sometimes wanting to live one’s own life. That queasy, potentially troubling undercurrent could make for an interesting movie, but Other Mommy (based on Josh Malerman’s 2024 novel, Incidents Around the House, which I haven’t read but sounds quite different, at least on a stylistic level) is not thoughtful or emotionally observant enough to do anything notable with it. Andy Muschietti’s infinitely better and sadder 2013 film, Mama, also starring Chastain, had similar ideas running through it. In fact, when the trailers for Other Mommy hit, I briefly entertained the notion it might be a sequel to that earlier picture. To stack the deck further against her, Ursula is also outfitted with an extramarital affair she’s having with their sleazy, rich friend Frank (Arian Moayed). Needless to say, Other Mommy does not approve. (By the way, they do call her “Other Mommy” in the movie, which leads to such delightful lines as “We’re not afraid of you, Other Mommy!” and “We’ve got Other Mommy right where we want her!”)

The film does begin to provide a few basic explanations for what Other Mommy really is and what she wants (Ursula’s mom, played by Karen Allen, is obsessed with the occult), but the exposition remains brief and unsatisfactory. Director Savage (The Boogeyman) is more interested in finding expressive ways to depict tension. His camera glides around rooms and pans at opportune moments to maximize the power of offscreen space. We watch one key conversation through a reflection in a compass that Bela always keeps around. The film presents clever visual ideas, in part because it doesn’t set too many parameters for what Other Mommy can do or where she can go; she seems able to do anything. The novel is written from Bela’s limited, childlike point of view. At times, the movie feels like it began life in a similar fashion but somewhere along the way became something more mundane and sensationalistic.

That hybrid origin — an attempt to replicate a child’s perspective while providing a conventional narrative foundation — might also be why Other Mommy doesn’t spend much time establishing the baseline reality of its world. Scenes blend into each other, and characters suddenly find themselves in different locations while Other Mommy extends her seemingly infinite power. (At one point, we see her enormous arm, the size of a building, emerge from the ocean.) This can occasionally be liberating: There were moments in Other Mommy when I had no idea what the film would show us next. But after a while, the lack of grounding gets tiring, as various supernatural shenanigans appear to be determined more by plot convenience than anything else. To put it another way: A monster without limits gets tiresome after a while. Other Mommy, though a mere 93 minutes, overstays its welcome.