Directors: Rob Savage
Writer: Nathan Elston
Stars: Jessica Chastain, Arabella Olivia Clark, Jay Duplass
Synopsis: Young Bela forms a relationship with a sinister entity in her home that looks uncannily like her own mother, drawing her into a terrifying and increasingly dark world.
One of the ever-present reasons why the horror genre continues to thrive even in its roughest of patches is because of how many avenues it can delve into that can add a new flavor to what are largely seen as tropes. Look no further than the success of the genre in this year alone with Obsession, Backrooms, or even smaller hits like Buddy and Undertone being able to stride their own unique tonal wavelengths to entertain and thrill audiences alike. Director Rob Savage himself has had a great handle on how to send pure shivers down a viewer’s spine with his found footage, COVID set horror flick Host all filmed via Zoom, which makes the plethora of issues within Other Mommy all the more baffling. It’s not that Other Mommy’s central concept isn’t intriguing as sinister doppelgänger plotlines have been a part of storytelling for years and there exist enough wiggle room in the concept to make it fresh, the problem is that Other Mommy can never decide what lane it wants to pick both tonally and narratively. Does it want to spook? Does it want to dip its toe into camp? Is it an all thrill no fill genre set piece ride? Does it want to actually sit with the thematic nuance behind a child’s reaction to familial strife? All concepts and ideas that Savage and writer Nathan Elston throw at a dart board that never register because of how quick the film wants to move on towards the next half-baked idea. The result is a sporadic mess that borders on incoherent at every turn no matter how many creepy smiles Jessica Chastain flashes at the camera.
The film starts with a look into the life of the Martin family as we mainly follow the perspective of young Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark) and her care under her two parents, Ursula (Chastain) and Russell (Jay Duplass). From the get-go when the parents are putting Bela to bed in the film’s opening, we see a clear rift within the family dynamic with Bela, more often than not, lacking a connection to her mom which we’ll later see is due to some marital problems in Russell and Ursula’s relationship. One place where Bela has found solace, however, is through an apparent bond that she’s formed with a demonic entity that she’s dubbed “Other Mommy” on account of her taking an exact appearance to her mother. Of course, throughout her many visits to her bathroom door to get Other Mommy to appear, the shapeshifting entity has a more insidious agenda for attaching itself to Bela so closely and it leads to the family being under extreme peril to find a way to rid themselves of the evil.
Other Mommy essentially peaks at its opening jumpscare sequence, right before the title card drop which you may or may not have been spooked by when seeing the trailer in front of a showing for The Odyssey back in July. The rest of the film essentially plays as stitched together setpieces following the family in their attempts to run away from Other Mommy by traveling from location to another location, and the central issue with this is just how repetitive both the film’s structural and filmmaking techniques become as it follows these beats. There’s nothing wrong with your movie being a bunch of escalating horror sequences, as long as you know how to structure them as properly built up within your narrative like Resident Evil accomplished just last month, but the investment breaks when the audience realizes each horror scene offers very little new from across the board. Once you’ve seen one bad looking CGI Jessica Chastain popping out for the same loud noise jumpscare, you’ve seen ’em all, and even aspects like the film’s creative techniques of transitioning from scene to scene become trite when it’s used for the 5th time.
Nearly every single scene that Other Mommy moves on to, as this family treats the threat of this entity as a minor inconvenience, the movie takes a complete 180 in what type of horror it’s trying to invoke. One minute you’ll see a genuine attempt to make the audience jump, the next you’ll witness scenes like Other Mommy talking to Bela while she’s on the toilet (????) and question whether the film is genuinely taking what’s currently on the screen as completely serious since it’s played that way. The film tries to, more or less, invoke touches of Nightmare on Elm Street, Coraline, and IT’s vibe across its reality bending sequences where the entity entraps Bela in these heightened dream sequences that only she can witness. None of it registers as something that’s truly part of the movie though since the breakneck speeds at which it moves to get to its next scene leave you with zero time to sit with anything it’s attempting to accomplish.
Most emblematic of this is when the movie decides to turn into an Insidious flick with ghost hunters led by Lois (Dichen Lachman) about half way through where every single problem previously stated is at its most egregious of a film that has not a single clue of what it wants to be. Of course, we can forget about the familial trauma at this film’s center (how could we have a new horror release without it?) and like with nearly everything else in Other Mommy, the themes of childhood manipulation and reaction to marital complications are lost at sea within a simultaneously predictable and ever clunky narrative. Alas, if these one silver lining to be found, it’s aspects of Chastain’s admittedly fun performance as she’s clearly down for whatever insanity is being thrown at that wall, pulling eerie smiles that would make Pearl from Pearl uneasy, but there is only so much she can do in a film that’s so unsure of itself.
The best I can possibly muster for Other Mommy is that it’s not the most miserable the genre has been within this year (as my review for The Strangers: Chapter 3 has a thing or two to say about that), but it isn’t that far off from the bottom of the rung either. It’s a tonally and structurally confused mess that has no idea what lane of scares or silliness it wants to showcase for its audience. No matter how many flashy transitions or ambitious spurts Other Mommy throws at you the film ends up feeling like a top ten best jumpscares of Blumhouse youtube video of sequences from completely different films being stitched together, and not a single one of them is particularly noteworthy.
