Other Mommy, the demonic alter ego that’s latched onto young Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark) in the latest from The Boogeyman director Rob Savage, makes its presence known to the grownups almost straight away. That its preferred form is that of Bela’s actual Mommy (Jessica Chastain) should unsettle, but Other Mommy is too formulaic and haphazard in its execution to generate anything resembling fear.
Nathan Elston‘s script, adapting Josh Malerman‘s Incidents Around the House, skips past explaining how Other Mommy arrived to an already forged bond between the maternal doppelgänger and a young child protagonist coping with a new school and parents who can barely mask their dysfunction. Daddo (Jay Duplass), Bela’s stay-at-home fun dad, and the career-focused Mommy occasionally steal glances that signal domestic woes bubbling beneath the surface, but they’re quickly tamped down for the sake of preserving the facade that everything’s ok.
The entity desperately wants into Bela’s heart, though, and has no qualms about interrupting, then wrecking the family’s lives to get it from practically the very start.
Savage zips from set piece to set piece, like a film edited and cut to death, linking empty jump scare sequences and uncanny valley-based disturbances with flashy camerawork that signals a stronger vision that never comes to pass. Other Mommy contorts not just her body, but reality and spaciality. Anniversary parties and playground ball pits that end in calamitous bendings of physics give the outward appearance of a haunted house movie trying something new, but it steadfastly adheres to formulaic mundanity. Half-hearted attempts to subvert familiar clichés and tropes, like the magical guide or the classic seance, amount to nothing more than quick punchlines before the family races off to the next scare sequence.
Other Mommy plays with visual perspective in its demonic machinations, but forgets to address storytelling perspective. It leads to baffling narrative choices, like having the 7-year-old Bela witness a gory evisceration mere feet from her, only to shake it off as if it was temporary indigestion in the next scene at a playplace (cue the next surreal scare attempt). Or the even more confounding climax, which picks the exact wrong moment for unearned heartfelt confessions too oddly placed to land with anything other than jarring bewilderment.
It all feels like the wrong approach to its child protagonist. Much like Other Mommy’s attempts to woo Bela through whimsically designed nightmares and distortions of childlike wonder, Savage mistakes the camera’s focus on Bela for interiority and perspective. We’re as passive as she is in her own clumsily stitched together story, as much in the dark outside of a few scattershot clues signaling a messy emotion based explanation. Don’t expect any supernatural worldbuilding or explanation here beyond its loose metaphors; Other Mommy has zero interest in logic, either.
Chastain gives it her all, playing Mommy and Other Mommy with heightened melodramatic flair, but it almost feels out of place in a film where everyone else is content to drift through paper-thin characters trapped in an outrageous scenario. Not even the film’s characters find the events as scary as they should be. Even when the insanity spills out into public view, it’s all met with a concerned, then confused, shrug.
It instills apathy in the viewer, too. Other Mommy is so flat and devoid of tension that by film’s end, you’re more likely to laugh or groan at the absurd lengths this family will go to avoid therapy than root for their triumph over an ultimately forgettable demonic entity. Even the briskly paced 94-minute runtime feels too cumbersome for such an inert and empty scarefest.
Other Mommy releases in theaters on October 8.
