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Other Mommy Dearest

The “Other Mother” as a horror concept was best articulated by Coraline, and Other Mommy has no hope of escaping its shadow. There, the entity of that name was a legitimately psychologically unsettling creature in addition to being freaky in power and appearance. She was a striking contrast of deceptive warmth to her counterpart and haunted the story even through her absence. The same effect is attempted by Other Mommy but never with any success. The game of her creepy, malevolent nature is given away so early that any real purpose or affection she might represent for her subject is handily neutralized. All that’s left is for her to spend an hour and a half being an inescapable boogeyman popping out at you regularly for an easy scare.
Coraline interestingly was not the basis of this film however, it was a novel by Josh Malerman called Incidents Around the House. It was only published a couple years ago, meaning the rights were snatched up by Blumhouse pretty fast for adaptation. And certainly it does feel like the script and filmmaking is rushed. With James Wan as producer, Blumhouse has in the last few months wasted no time in cynically associating this film through its marketing with the two horror mega-hits of the year, Obsession and Backrooms -which is really quite the warning sign if you think about it. What movie that can stand on its own needs the reputational backing of movies audiences already like?
Directed by Rob Savage, Other Mommy centres on seven-year-old Bella Martin (Arabella Olivia Clark) who reads that her parents are in something of a rough and unhappy place. Her father Russ (Jay Duplass) is a stay-at-home dad looking after her while her mother Ursula (Jessica Chastain) is consumed by her work and ignorant of what’s going on in her family’s life -she is generally, and perhaps unconsciously, emotionally distant from her daughter. In this vacuum comes an entity that resembles Ursula, whom Bella refers to as “Other Mommy”, tempting Bella with kind overtures and desperately asking to be ‘let into her heart’.
The ruse is exposed extremely quickly -before even the film’s title card appears- there is no showcase of the relationship of trust that is built between Bella and the Other Mommy, who seems to have existed for some span of time, albeit limited in movement to Bella’s bedroom closet. Yet even Bella seems confused by her corporeality when she appears in the kitchen early on and it doesn’t take long for her to become unnerved by this creature she supposedly has gotten used to. Other Mommy is able to change forms and so there is one part of a sequence in which she is masquerading as Bella’s babysitter Kelvin (Sean Kaufman) that suggests a bit of the appeal she represents for Bella -but otherwise there is no reason shown for why Bella should be moved by her at all in the first place. She is from the start frightful and threatening.
Aesthetically so at least. Other Mommy -which is the official name of this monster, used by multiple people besides Bella in a sincere tone that you can’t help but laugh at- is quite the powerful beast. A shapeshifter who can distort her appearance in any number of grotesque ways, who can create visions for Bella and move her and her surroundings through space, is not tied herself to any one place, and has certain telekinetic powers on top of it, she is a creature seemingly designed to be difficult to hurt or kill -which the film emphasizes on several occasions, where she keeps coming back in spite of the family’s efforts to escape her. Perhaps the intent of this is to make her more scary, but it has rather the opposite effect -numbing the audience to anything she can do and where she will appear. Often the scary effects of the character seem purely for their own sake -a pair of ugly gnarled feet in one scene for instance only present for a cheap bit of shock, and the movie is certainly not averse to that as a horror tactic.
Yes, this is a movie that enjoys its jump scares, and some particularly nonsensical ones as well. There are a couple that are distinct, such as Other Mommy crouched slyly under the kitchen island, but most of them are conventional pop-ups or shifts in expression -at times the execution of the scare actually obscures what might be a more unnerving visual, like the tiny glimpses we get of what Other Mommy's face actually looks like. And while there is not much in the way of gore in this movie, it does use its one opportunity for a brutal death to make it as over-the-top cartoonishly vivid as possible. There are good avenues for horror that are open in this movie, in the mystery around Other Mommy, what she wants with Bella, and the ways in which she presents herself -but so few of them are taken in favour of repetitious scares in shifting set-pieces.
And Chastain herself doesn’t really add anything, apart from the clout of being an Oscar-winning actress. You wouldn’t know it from this performance, which is really mundane in the Ursula role and awkward in the Other Mommy role -which requires a lot of strained expression, tight faces and wide smiles. It almost comes off as a kind of mugging at times. None of the other adult actors come off well in the movie, even Karen Allen as a stereotypically sage grandmother, but the nearest thing to a saving grace might actually be Clark, who turns out a surprisingly convincing and well-rounded performance for a girl her age and authentically carries the movie. It reminds me almost of Mckenna Grace in Gifted, and its not hard to foresee a similar career trajectory in this girl’s future. Certainly she at least deserves a better film to showcase herself in.
Little of what might make the concept of this movie interesting is present in the movie itself. Other Mommy had the capacity to be a truly frightening piece of doppelganger horror. There are other elements in the background here, such as Ursula’s disconnect from her family, the marital troubles between her and Russ, and the climate it creates that would draw Bella to Other Mommy (in a manner similar to Coraline), but Savage has such disinterest in making this drama engaging. It is background noise to the spook show, which is itself incredibly lacking. Blumhouse advertised this movie with a reminder of recent successes they would like to suggest speak to the general quality of their output overall. Other Mommy disproves that notion and will never again be uttered in the same breath.

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