Tough year for Other Mommy to come out. In what will be known as the year of new, exciting horror films, Obsession and Backrooms, along comes this studio approved film that simply can’t measure up. If you go into Other Mommy with those expectations, and an open heart, I think you might be more pleasantly surprised than you might think for its silly nonsense.
Bela Martin (Arabella Olivia Clark) is growing up in a weird home. She’s not wanting for anything, and yet she’s sad cause of her parents. Her daddo Russ (Jay Duplass), really loves Bela, but is adrift in his career. And mom Ursula (Jessica Chastain) is the opposite: pretty eager to leave the house to work long hours to “support the family.” This leads poor Bela to make, um, new friends, like Other Mommy (also Chastain), who gives her attention and time, and in return only wants Bela to let Other Mommy into Bela’s heart.
Rob Savage is the yeoman director of Other Mommy. Initially, he goes for a creepy atmosphere and standard horror tactics, like a scary kids bedroom or demented CGI distortion of Jessica Chastain to elicit the fear required to make a horror movie work. However, I can see him in post, editing the film, realizing he might be making a real lemon. CGI can be a great tool, but here it’s pretty atrocious, going for weirdo body dysmorphia and landing somewhere between unintentionally funny and real stupid. The plot also starts to really make no sense. Something genuinely scary happens to Bela at a party in front of a bunch of people there for Ursula/Russ’s anniversary, and not one person calls the police, or posts anything to social media. We’re just gonna move past it. The movie’s real rock bottom is the scene after, where a character named Uncle Frank (Arian Moayed) who’s there to be Other Mommy’s victim is dispatched in the weirdest, unconvincing CGI imaginable, taking any hopes of real stakes down with the movie. That scene was so bad I was maybe gonna take a nap get get a little rest before the next film I was gonna watch.
But Rob Savage says no. He turns this lemon into at least a pretty fizzy lemonade. After that low, the movie removes any pretenses of serious filmmaking, and leans head first into over the top camp. As you might expect, a medium (Dichen Lachman) comes into play to try to expel Other Mommy from the Martin family. In a serious film, that would be scary, intense, and very dramatic; but Savage instead leans hard into the wonderful idiocy of a very serious ghost hunter saying the title of the movie, over and over again, without an ounce of irony. When Dichen Lachman screams, “will the entity known as Other Mommy show themselves!”, cackles erupted from my theater, as if Savage gave us permission to laugh at his “failure.” Character development instead becomes some of the worst pep talk sequences in movie history, telling an 8ish year old about how “humans hurt each other, but that’s a good thing” and “I love you, but I never wanted to be your mom”, truly insane things to reveal for no reason other than to keep the plot moving. And with the pressure off, Savage gets to pull off a couple pretty good scares out of nowhere too (one at a lighthouse beach legitimately caused my heart to leap). The ending doesn’t work because that was clearly shot before the tonal shift, but at that point I didn’t really care, because I had a blast with the camp.
Listen, the “elevated horror” game has produced a lot of great intense scary fare that I’ve enjoyed watching on that deep primal level. But sometimes, you need a great reminder there’s another end to the horror spectrum that can be fun in its own right. Even though Other Mommy is at war with itself, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have these flashes of dumb brilliance that reset your internal stakes without pissing you off that you wasted your money. You can bet when I see something weird I WILL be saying “See that? That’s the entity known as Other Mommy”, giggling to myself along the way.