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Other Mommy Had a Nightmare Premise and Served It Up Lukewarm
Jessica Chastain vs. Jessica Chastain should have been SO much scarier than this
I had been counting down to this movie for months. Hyping it up to anyone who would listen, rewatching the trailer, building it up in my head into the horror event of the year.
The premise alone had me in a chokehold: a little girl befriends a demonic entity wearing her mother's face, an "other mommy" that keeps asking to come inside her heart. That is nightmare fuel of the highest order. I wanted to be destroyed by this movie. Reader, I was not destroyed. I was mildly inconvenienced, and that's so much worse.
Rob Savage, who gave us Host and The Boogeyman, knows how to scare people. Jessica Chastain is an Oscar winner playing both the loving mom and the thing pretending to be her. The source novel by Josh Malerman is apparently genuinely unsettling because it's told entirely from an eight-year-old's point of view.
Every ingredient for a masterpiece was sitting right there on the counter. And somehow they still cooked up something you'll forget by the time you reach your car.
TMJ Rating: 🍿🍿/5
What You Need to Know
Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark) is a little girl who's been talking to a presence in her house she calls Other Mommy. This entity wants to climb inside her and take over, sending Bela somewhere else, and she's smart enough to say no.
But she keeps Other Mommy around as a friend anyway, because her parents' marriage is falling apart and this thing offers her comfort. Her mom Ursula (Jessica Chastain) and dad Russ (Jay Duplass) soon realize the horror is very real, and the family has to figure out how to get rid of something that looks exactly like the woman they love.
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What DOES Work in Other Mommy
Credit where it's due, the movie looks fantastic. The cinematography gets genuinely creative, setting up these gorgeous, dread-soaked shots that promise something special is coming. There's real craft in how it's framed.
And Chastain is great. Playing both the real mother and the contorted, wrong version of her, she commits hard to the creepy physicality and sells the horror better than the script deserves. When she's twisted up and moving wrong, she's legitimately disturbing.
The best thing the movie does is skip the tired horror formula where one character sees the ghost and nobody believes them for ninety minutes. Here, the dad sees Other Mommy contorted under the table almost immediately, falls through a glass table, and the whole family gets on the same page fast.
Finally, a horror family that goes "yes, this is real, let's deal with it" instead of gaslighting each other for the entire runtime. I appreciated that so much. The movie respects your time in that one specific way.
Where It Fell Apart
Here's my problem, and it's a big one. The movie is a coward.
It sets up these beautiful, tense, creative scenarios and then, right when it should commit to something strange and genuinely frightening, it goes "jump scare, gotcha" and moves on. Every single time. It builds and builds and then deflates itself with the cheapest trick in the book. It's like watching someone draw back a bow with perfect form and then just gently set the arrow down.
They also show you the monster out of its mommy-skin way too early. The second you see the tall, red-eyed, gross, contorted thing brutalizing a guy with gore everywhere, the mystery evaporates. We've seen that creature in a hundred other movies.
The scariest version of Other Mommy was the one that looked like mom and felt wrong, and they threw that away for a generic CGI goblin.
And the jump scares. Listen, I don't even hate jump scares when they're earned, when you've built real tension and the scare releases it. But when your entire horror strategy is just making loud noises at the audience, you've admitted you don't trust your own premise. A story this unsettling deserved slow-burn psychological dread, not a haunted house ride.
The child's-eye-view perspective that made the book so special? Mostly gone. That was the whole thing. That was the secret weapon. Leaving it on the table is the biggest crime here.
My Rating
It's not unwatchable. It moves fast, it looks good, and Chastain is doing everything she can. But a premise this nightmarish deserved a filmmaker willing to actually go somewhere dark and weird with it, and this plays it frustratingly safe.
I wanted to leave the theater shaken. I left it shrugging. When the scariest thing about your horror movie is how much potential it wasted, something went wrong. Wait for streaming, keep your expectations in the basement, and maybe go read the book instead.
Did this one scare you or did you also feel cheated? Are you as mad about the early monster reveal as I am? And can we please get Jessica Chastain a horror movie that deserves her? Come commiserate with me, I need to grieve the movie this could have been.
