Other Mommy Review

Other Mommy is in theaters now.

Although she’s made her reputation (and her Academy Award) on prestige dramas, Jessica Chastain is no stranger to horror. The Sacramento-born thespian has starred in the likes of Mama, It: Chapter Two, and the underrated Guillermo del Toro joint Crimson Peak, and once more returns to the genre with Other Mommy, a new film from director Rob Savage where Chastain plays the dual role of a mother and her demonic doppelganger. Sadly, the film wastes what should be a slam dunk premise (and a trailer that went viral based on a well-timed jump scare) on a generic script and not enough ideas to fill out even its brisk 90-minute runtime.

Arabella Olivia Clark stars as Bela, a seven-year-old girl living a not-quite idyllic suburban family life with distant mother Ursula (Chastain) and doting father Russell (Jay Duplass). There’s some tension in the home stemming from Ursula’s seeming workaholic lifestyle that Bela is already aware is actually a cover for her mother having an affair, but not enough that her parents haven’t been blissfully unaware that Bela has been hanging out with a not-imaginary friend named Other Mommy (also Chastain). Other Mommy loves spending time with Bela when Ursula can’t be bothered but also won’t stop insisting that Bela agree to let Other Mommy “into her heart,” the outcome of which is assuredly some form of demonic possession but also isn’t explained enough for the audience to dread it.

What follows is a surprisingly quick acknowledgment from Ursula and Russell that something supernatural is going on, and the family fleeing their home to locale after locale where Other Mommy inevitably arrives to cause more mystic mayhem. In a strange move for a movie like this, Savage rarely tries to mine fear from the setting or its corruption thereof, instead betting all his chips on how Other Mommy distorts herself and the scene around her with reality-warping powers that can’t help but come off like hollow, budget-conscious spectacle. The inconsistency in how Other Mommy’s sinister illusions manifest removes a lot of their bite; one scene features an extended shot of Chastain’s neck stretching with unconvincing CGI, while another features some agreeably gooey practical body horror that’s shown for only a few seconds. This approach results in a movie that doesn’t come close to being as unnerving as it clearly wants to be.

Not helping matters is the impression that the movie can’t settle on a coherent identity, instead grabbing bits and pieces from other movies and trying them on for size like Other Mommy does with other people’s skins. Savage invokes movies like It, Smile, Coraline, and The Conjuring (that last one is understandable given James Wan’s producer credit here), but never delivers an iconic visual or concept that other movies could hypothetically crib from him. Even the main conceit of Chastain playing the dual lead role is watered down by Other Mommy sometimes taking on different disguises, a confounding gambit given that the movie never tries to generate suspense from the characters possibly not knowing who in the room is Other Mommy. It all leads to a conclusion centered around revealing the dark family secret that made Other Mommy target Bela in the first place, but the answer is too little too late to make the journey worth the effort.

Details

Still, the reason to see this is why anyone will bother picking up a ticket: Jessica Chastain breaking bad as Other Mommy. Chastain taking her bread and butter intensity and channeling it into a maternal Deadite is the kind of hook that will likely catapult Other Mommy to profitability regardless of critical reviews. If only Savage was more willing to trust his leading lady, often smothering Chastain’s incredible physical performance with droopy facial VFX and rapid cuts. Nathan Elston's screenplay also never gives her a character to play on the other side of the coin, with Ursula being more of a checklist of “unattentive mother” tropes instead of a human being. There’s no exploration of Ursula’s emotional reality and why she can only seem to care for Bela in an ancillary capacity to make effective contrast with Other Mommy’s malicious clinginess. If Ursula doesn’t want to be part of the family, what does she want? The movie doesn’t seem to know.

Chastain still commits even with such flimsy material, and to give Savage credit, he does a great job directing Arabella Olivia Clark to a child performance that’s one of the best parts of the movie. Bela has more screen time than anyone else, and the movie avoids many of the pitfalls of having a child lead even when the storytelling often comes up short in other ways. The most specificity that the family unit gets is everyone referring to Russell as “Daddo” instead of “Daddy” – a cute detail that wouldn’t be remarkable if the movie didn’t have an emotional vacancy where its dramatic engine should be. Even the gore and scare sequences don't leave much impact beyond a couple of early exceptions, resulting in a film that unfortunately runs out of energy long before the credits roll.