This movie is titled Other Mommy (now on VOD services like Prime Video) because the phrase “Other Mother” was already claimed by a different movie. A better one? We’ll see, but those of us who appreciate Henry Selick’s 2009 stop-motion Neil Gaiman adaptation Coraline are already wrong-footed by Other Mommy — a solid $115 million theatrical hit — before it even starts. But maybe star Jessica Chastain can smooth over such trepidations?
OTHER MOMMY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: We open with the happy-family-bedtime scene in which young Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark) and her “daddo” Russ (Jay Duplass) romp around in their jammies until mom Ursula (Chastain) humorlessly puts a stop to it. That’s the dynamic of the Martin family in a nutshell: The distant Ursula works to afford this enormous house while a perma-bathrobed Russ stay-at-home-dads sweet little Bela. Anybody else live in this almost-mansion? Funny you should ask. The answer is no, but also yes, because in Bela’s closet is Other Mommy, an Ursula doppelganger with a Joker-ish rictus and stringy hair whose face tends to distort into grotesque mutations. Ick!
I interrupt this plot summary to point out how other horror movies tend to tease the reveal of the monster, but Other Mommy isn’t interested in such subtleties. It leaves very little to the imagination as it stacks up disturbing instances without even bothering to indulge the cliche where the kid claims she’s seeing bizarre shit and the adults don’t believe her. Other Mommy just emerges from the shadows, proclaims how it wants to “go inside Bela’s heart” and wreaks havoc while everyone in the movie shrieks, and everyone in the audience squints and rubs their temples.
And so we get an array of crazy set pieces: at Russ and Ursula’s seventh-anniversary party, at Ursula’s wacky mother’s (Karen Allen) house, at the ball pit in the kiddie chaostime funcenter. A medium and some ghost hunters get involved but they seem doomed before they set up their high-tech gear. Does this predickyment have anything to do with the big scar on Bela’s back? What about the psycholomological ramifications of a mom who doesn’t seem to be meeting her little girls’ needs? Well, there’s scads of screamingly obvious symbolism in this movie that’s pointing to the why of it all, which leaves nothing in question thematically. That’s one reason why this movie is bad and it stinks!
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? The aforementioned Coraline, with a bit of Hereditary and a goodly chunk of Poltergeist too.
Performance Worth Watching: Chastain tries to land her conflicted-mother character in a moral gray area, but this movie shows little interest in her stabs at subtlety. The only moment that’s functional is an Allen speech that gives us an earnest interlude amidst all the noise.
Our Take: Other Mommy is so grossly logic-deprived, I’m flunking it and making it retake the second grade. It has no internal narrative “rules” that dictate Other Mommy’s ability to change form or manifest. It shows up wherever the plot needs it to be, because that way it’s easier to reverse-engineer a collection of set pieces into something resembling a story. A story that at best seems vaguely interested in exploring how some parents have deeply mixed feelings about raising children, a cliche that’s turned up in many recent films, like Nightbitch and Tully — or exploring the child-psych nightmares that made Coraline so memorable.
Director Rob Savage (the similarly nonsensical The Boogeyman) maintains a hyperventilative pace and tone and indulges way-outta-control CGI in pursuit of, I dunno, the Guinness world record for jump scares? He reportedly bragged that there’s 50 of them in this eyerollingly silly movie. Hooray? Savage shows some creativity in the way he stages and executes some of these set pieces, and splatters the walls with gore a couple times, all of which might be enough to satisfy some of you horror sickos out there. But those of us who prefer our scary flix to generate some tension, make a modicum of sense and follow through on its thematic implications will recognize Other Mommy for the annoying dreck that it is.
Our Call: Emancipate yourself from Other Mommy. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
