What’s It About

Bela, an eight-year-old girl living in a home with marital problems, confronts a sinister entity that comes out of her closet. The presence, whom she calls “Other Mommy,” becomes increasingly threatening to her and her family.

MOVIESinMO REVIEW

I’m about ready to give up on Hollywood. It feels like nine out of every ten movies this year have been straight trash, and Other Mommy just pulled up a chair at that table. This movie is a hot mess, and everybody who worked on it should be a little embarrassed. Other Mommy is based on Josh Malerman’s 2024 novel “Incidents Around the House”. Malerman is the same dude who wrote Bird Box, so the source material had real potential. Rob Savage directs, Nathan Elston wrote the script, and somewhere between the page and the screen, the whole thing fell apart. The red flags show up early. The story is supposed to take place in some regular American city that never gets a name. It might as well had been Springfield from The Simpsons. Realistically, they shot the whole thing in Dublin and Wicklow, Ireland. You can feel it, too. Nothing about the place looks or feels like home. If you can’t even fake the setting right, what else you gonna mess up? Turns out, pretty much everything. The story is basically about Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark), an eight-year-old girl who keeps seeing and talking to something that looks exactly like her mother, Ursula (Jessica Chastain). Bela calls it Other Mommy. At first it seems like a kid’s imaginary friend gone wrong, but then her dad, Russ (Jay Duplass), spots it one night and figures a burglar who happens to look just like his wife broke into the house. He calls the cops, the thing vanishes, and nothing comes of it. Then Ursula sees it too, and now she knows Russ ain’t crazy. So how does Bela tell her real mama from the fake one? She smells the difference. That’s it. That’s the whole system. Other Mommy’s face switches between looking like a dead robot and looking like it’s melting off. She crouches in weird corners, all twisted up like a spider, and she kills anybody who gets in her way. What she really wants is to get inside Bela’s heart, but Bela has to give her permission first. Other Mommy claims she only wants to protect the girl and that she helps “special children.” Okay. Sure. Bela also carries a gold compass that calls Other Mommy and drops Bela into some kind of fever dream. Where did that compass come from? Don’t ask, because the movie never tells you. Same goes for the demon herself. We never learn where she came from or what rules she plays by. The movie doesn’t care much about building a real world around this family, either. A teenage babysitter named Kelvin pops up for about ten minutes, and his whole purpose is exactly what you think it is. Nobody explains how the family even knows him. He shows up, and then he doesn’t. Nobody in this household seems to have a job, even though they live in a regular middle-class house. And it’s summer, which is the movie’s excuse for why Bela isn’t in school and doesn’t have any friends. In the book, she has friends. On screen, she’s alone. Translation: they wanted a smaller cast and a cheaper budget. Once Other Mommy starts taking people out, the parents grab Bela and hit the road. They skip the police because they figure nobody will believe them (duh). That’s when these oblivious parents start acting like they’ve never met a real human being. There’s a scene right after they witness a gruesome murder, where Russ flips into happy-dad mode and takes Bela to the playground like nothing happened. Later, the parents spread a row of big knives across a table and tell their little girl to pick one, like she’s training to be the next Black Widow. Make it make sense. The road trip ends at the home of Ursula’s mother, Ruth (Karen Allen), a widow with psychic gifts. Ruth calls in her ghost-hunting crew, including a paranormal expert named Lois (Dichen Lachman), to hold a séance. From there, the movie gets dumber and dumber until it lands on an ending so goofy it wipes out whatever little tension came before it. Savage isn’t new to this. He made Host, Dashcam, and The Boogeyman, so we know he can scare people. Here, though, he just throws jump scares at the wall to see what sticks. The scary scenes are sloppy, although some of the visuals land a few creepy moments, they fade fast and can’t rescue the story. The CGI is rough, too. Other Mommy’s transformations look like a cutscene from an 80s video game. Worst of all, the movie takes itself dead serious while being completely ridiculous. By the finale, half the theater I was in was pissed, while the other half was laughing. Not nervous laughing. Real laughing. That’s the worst thing that can happen to a horror movie. The acting doesn’t help much. Jessica Chastain gives it everything, and I’ll give her that. She plays both Ursula and the demon, and she fully commits to the strange faces and creepy body movements. But one actress twisting herself into knots can’t save a script this broken. Jay Duplass mostly stands around looking lost. Arabella Olivia Clark does what she can with a character whose only job is to scream and look scared. That’s the real problem here. Nobody gets a role with any depth. The kid is a target, the dad is a prop, and even Chastain is stuck playing two halves of a woman the movie never bothers to understand. The dialogue is weak, and some lines are so bad you want to laugh, but the movie is too boring to squeeze out even a good chuckle. Other Mommy wants to be scary so badly, but it just isn’t. It plays like a haunted house ride where stuff jumps out at you, yet you never feel real fear. The story has no rules, the characters act fake, and the movie explains nothing. It’s a cash-grab adaptation that does the book dirty. If you want to be bored and annoyed in a dark room, go ahead and buy a ticket. Otherwise, save your coins.

OUR RATING – AN UNSENSIBLE 2