Cert – 15, Run-time – 1 hour 33 minutes, Director – Rob Savage
A family’s life and home is upended when a supernatural force claiming to be their seven-year-old’s (Arabella Olivia Clark) ‘Other Mommy’ (Jessica Chastain) attempts to possess her.
Normally when catching up on new releases post-London Film Festival there’ll be at least one film I skip, whether due to few or poor timings, not being able to line things up or just maybe saving some time after poor word-of-mouth. Yet, even with Other Mommy’s weak reception, and marketing, the draw of director Rob Savage pulled me in. Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem entirely present in the final film.
There are effective CG monster forms which see multiple layers and rows of teeth appearing through heads splitting apart, similar to some of the strangeness we saw in Savage’s livestream-based horror Dashcam. However, there’s no real gimmick or trickery to Other Mommy, the director’s second studio film after 2023’s The Boogeyman, which while I defended received a generally lukewarm reception. Jessica Chastain plays both Ursula and Other Mommy – one the mother of seven-year-old Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark), the other a demonic presence taking the form of Ursula, trying to possess the young girl.
For the first half, with Other Mommy’s existence shown to Ursula and husband Russ (Jay Duplass) very early on, there’s a generally likable, if not entirely creepy, set of events. They’re largely led by Other Mommy just attacking and showing that she’s still around rather than pushing the plot along. When things try to develop in the second half with the attitude of ‘we need to kill this thing’ the script takes a dive into the more ridiculous, as the demon seems to be able to transport people, or fill a car with ball pit balls. There’s the feeling of ideas strung together rather than consistently linking. What’s on screen doesn’t quite feel as if it’s trying to be comedic or a fun kind of horror, it just feels silly and sometimes tonally at odds with the rest of the film that’s come before it, and the effect that the demon is perhaps supposed to have – even if Chastain commits perhaps more to potential humour in how she plays up the supernatural being.
There’s little room for suspense or threat to be built-up or lived in as the script, credited to Nathan Elston, doesn’t allow for it. Savage appears to have worked best thus far when directing his own screenplays, and the chaotic horror they allow for. Chaos isn’t on the menu for Other Mommy. Maybe an occasional burst of mild catharsis, but that’s as far as things are allowed to go in a script that has little room for anything beyond a conventional studio horror flick. Particularly in the tonal swings of the second half which is more a set of sudden sequences trying to work out what film this wants to be rather than following how the perfectly fine, if not exactly scary, first half went. A shame for the glimpses of what could have been had Rob Savage not felt more for-hire here.
There are only brief glimpses of what Savage could have brought to Other Mommy as the script follows the lines of a standard studio horror that falls apart in the strange swings of the second half.
