Review: ‘Other Mommy’ is almost a career-worst for Jessica Chastain and worse, it’s not even scary

Other Mommy feels like a movie snatched from its director by meddling studio executives who’ve edited it down to the point of incoherence. I’ve got no idea whether that’s actually the case, but for director Rob Savage’s sake, I certainly hope it is. Because if this is the movie he wanted to make? Hoo boy…

Savage has every ingredient necessary to make a killer Halloween horror smash. The main course is, obviously, Jessica Chastain, here double-deployed as victim and monster. But that’s backed up by a talented child star, a decent supporting cast, a cinematographer who knows how to frame a shot, and a healthy visual effects budget.

Plus, the core concept of a child having a secret and supernatural ‘other mommy’ who lurks in the shadows is bristling with spooky possibilities. I haven’t read the novel this adapts – Josh Malerman’s Incidents Around the House – but it seems like it was fairly well-received.

“A real dog’s breakfast”

And yet, for an almost impressive variety of reasons, this is a real dog’s breakfast of a horror movie. It all starts so promisingly! The first ten minutes appear to be establishing a tense supernatural thriller, with the young Bela treating the overtly sinister Other Mommy like a friendly playmate. For her part, Other Mommy seems to genuinely care for Bela, albeit in a twisted and weird way.

As Jessica Chastain’s actual mommy is efficiently established as a brusque career woman with no time for her family and engaged in the most obvious extramarital affair in the history of cinema, I couldn’t help but wonder… Maybe the grotesque Other Mommy isn’t the real monster here? Maybe, just maybe, we shouldn’t judge by appearances?

Just a couple of scenes later, Other Mommy becomes a ten-foot-tall ghoul freak with glowing red eyes and explodes someone’s head like a watermelon. Ah, okay, gotcha. Other Mommy is the monster. But even that would be okay if the movie was actually scary, though it takes a perverse pleasure in deflating any tension inherent to the premise.

You might think a movie about a monster that can perfectly impersonate somebody would naturally lead to scenes where someone is unknowingly interacting with Other Mommy without knowing they’re a demon. Nope. How about the slow-burning chills as the parents realize their child’s imaginary friend isn’t so imaginary after all? Nah, let’s just have Other Mommy scuttle out from under the kitchen table in broad daylight right in front of Dad about 15 minutes in.

Perhaps there’s an argument for skipping the build-up and getting into a rollercoaster of frights as quickly as possible. However, if that leads to your characters just sort of accepting they now share a home with a shapeshifting demon, it doesn’t give the film propulsive momentum, it instead makes your characters sound insane.

And then there’s Other Mommy herself. I’ve always argued that every great horror monster comes with rules attached. Vampires hate sunlight, you must destroy the head to kill a zombie, Freddy can only get you in your dreams, and so on. Obviously, you can bend those rules, but they at least give the characters a framework for how to deal with the situation.

Other Mommy has no rules and can basically do anything. She can shapeshift, teleport to anywhere on Earth, grow to Kaiju-size, materialize any object, plunge people into living nightmares, and teleport other people to wherever she wants. She’s bulletproof. She can melt people. She can fly (well, hover). Other Mommy’s stated motivation is that she wants to “carnate” (i.e. reincarnate without the first bit). Frankly, she already seems pretty damn carnate to me!

After all that, you might be curious how the characters defeat her. Well, without spoiling anything, having seen the credits roll, I still have no idea. She just kind of… goes away?

Other Mommy does have one saving grace: it’s not boring. For example, at the end of the second act, a cartoonish squad of Ghostbusters suddenly appear to battle Other Mommy. They’re forgotten about just as quickly as they appear as the movie is (as always) eager to move on. But, for a brief shining moment, it turns into a camp Ghost Hunt caper. If only they’d stuck around…

But any delights are few and far between. Other Mommy would represent a career low for Jessica Chastain were it not for the existence of Dark Phoenix, but it’s a testament to the film’s overall crapness that even she’s dragged down by this disasterpiece.