Other Mommy (2026)
A successful viral
marketing campaign can be a double-edged sword. Drumming up audience interest
in a movie is, of course, half the battle. However, having the cinematic goods
to keep your audience from wanting to throw their popcorn at the screen is the
other half. Unfortunately, despite a fiercely committed Jessica Chastain in the
lead, Other Mommy is likely to inspire more groans and sighs than
screams from its audiences.
It's
a shame, too, because Other Mommy starts promisingly. The film picks up
with 7-year-old Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark) at home with her stay-at-home dad
Russ (Jay Duplass). While playing around the house, Bela encounters Other Mommy
(Jessica Chastain), a bizarro version of her mother Ursula with unclear
intentions. Feeding off of Bela's increasing anxiety about the state of her
parents' tense marriage, Other Mommy asks Bela to allow her to enter Bela's
heart, a sinister ask that Bela has the good sense to refuse. When both Russ
and Ursula also encounter the spectral Other Mommy, the family quickly realizes
they are in imminent danger, eventually enlisting an exorcist to try to cast
the ominous Other Mommy out of their lives.
Other
Mommy's opening, captured so memorably in the
film's now-infamous viral trailer, suggests a spooky and surprising horror
story that the film never delivers on. In particular, the movie's decision to
alert the parents to its supernatural happenings so early could have provided a
fascinating narrative turn. Instead, the movie grinds its gears with long and
muddled dreamlike set pieces that, while occasionally visually arresting, are
completely devoid of tension. In particular, the film's last third becomes
increasingly incoherent, a jumble of supernatural movie tropes which never add
up to anything.
Chastain,
an Oscar winner and never less than fully committed no matter the material, has
always known how to walk that tightrope between self-serious intensity and
campy fun (think of her charismatic turns in decidedly imperfect movies such as
The Help and Molly's Game). She does what she can with her dual
role here, but the movie just gives her too little to work with. Ursula is a
vague, disappointingly stereotypical collection of "dissatisfied mom"
stereotypes and signifiers. And Other Mommy, while intermittently chilling,
never becomes deeper than a stock supernatural villain.
For a truly
thoughtful and scarily effective look at the darkest parts of parenthood, see
2014's The Babadook or 2018's Hereditary. Save yourself the cinematic
time-out and skip Other Mommy.
