You know a horror movie probably isn’t quite firing on all cylinders when one character is forced to take another aside and explicitly state: “I am actually scared”. Indeed, when Jessica Chastain’s Ursula delivers this line towards the end of Other Mommy, the audience, too, may need reminding that they’re supposed to be watching from between their fingers, given they’ve just seen Ursula larking about with a cocktail in hand while being hunted by a demonic entity. It’s a tonal glitch that encapsulates the film’s core problem — Other Mommy pinballs at breakneck speed between austere supernatural thriller, Raimi-esque OTT horror-comedy and earnest family drama, never quite sticking the landing on any of them.
The film’s Coraline-y premise is this: seven-year-old Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark) lives with her standoffish, workaholic mum (Chastain) and cuddly, stoner, stay-at-home dad (Jay Duplass). But Bela has a secret: she is regularly visited by ‘Other Mommy’ (also Chastain) — a malevolent shape-shifter that takes the form of Ursula, and harbours the rather vague intention of being “let into” Bela’s heart. The initially novel thing about the film is that Bela’s secret doesn’t remain secret for long. While other child-meets-monster movies might dedicate a good hour to the adults whispering anxiously about whether this is all in the kid’s head, ‘Other Mommy’ reveals herself to the entire family within the first 15 minutes, via a series of heart-jolting jump scares. From there, Bela, dad and ‘Real Mommy’ spend the rest of the runtime being chased by the eerily grinning doppelgänger through a series of increasingly ludicrous locations, from a high-tech seance to a soft-play centre.
There appear to be no clear rules here about the physics of the monster.
Director Rob Savage previously explored both demons and seances in his superb 2020 breakout Host. But while that movie was lean and clear-eyed, its terror carefully grounded in reality, Other Mommy feels as rubbery and disjointed as its antagonist’s limbs. There appear to be no clear rules here about the physics of the monster: one minute it can’t get through a barricaded door, the next it’s managed to fill a locked car with colourful plastic balls. All of which conspires to make ‘Other Mommy’ feel less like a genuine, nightmare-inducing threat, and more a tour guide on a carnival ride of bombastic hallucinatory sequences that often don’t even feel linked to one another.
Chastain gives it her all as Ursula and ‘Other Mommy’, and she’s immensely watchable as both — icily distant as the former, psychotically overbearing as the latter. And there’s fun to be had in some of the more gory moments, particularly the monster’s inability to manifest the correct number of human fingers (extra-dimensional demons apparently have much in common with AI slop). But when the film enters its third act, and we are suddenly plunged into the family’s history and internal machinations, we find we simply don’t know these characters well enough to be able to invest. And ultimately, just as the dramatic elements aren’t quite sufficient to stir the emotions, the horror never truly gets under the skin, either. Other Mommy might occasionally leave you shocked or startled — but “actually scared”? Probably not.