Other Mommy review: Jessica Chastain shines in stale, bland horror
Director Rob Savage’s film builds neither fear nor suspense, thanks to beaten-to-death jump scares and ineffective storytelling.
Other Mommy's failure to bring something novel to the table makes the scare attempts appear goofy.
‘Other Mommy’, the demonic doppelgänger of young Bella’s (Arabella Olivia Clark) mother, Ursula (Jessica Chastain), wants to find a host in Bella to manifest itself in a human form. It makes itself familiar with the parents almost immediately, which sets a very fresh premise for the story to unfold because most horror films take up the entire first act to establish a confrontational scene with the ‘demon’. But ‘Other Mommy’ uses up all its originality within these first few minutes and is left with nothing but stale and dull horror mimicry for its remaining runtime.
Director Rob Savage’s supernatural horror skips past why the doppelganger wants to reincarnate as a human or how it was able to develop a close bond with the child. Perhaps the child, coping in a broken household with a barely available mother who works past bedtime and a stay-at-home father, Russ (Jay Duplass), who is never really able to bond with her, finds a friend in the maternal entity. These answers are left for the audience to gather since Bella’s parents themselves readily accept that their child is being followed by a spirit and ask no questions about the why, who, how, or what the alternative could be.
No attempt at novelty
Other Mommy fails to do justice to its genre, thanks to its generic jump scares, not-so-eerie tracking shots and slow reveals of a supernatural entity lurking behind an object in focus. Like other monsters that have dabbled in the possession of young children — think The Exorcist (1977) or The Conjuring 2 (2016) — Other Mommy’s doppelganger jumps from room to room, shapeshifts and also possesses kinetic qualities, but the film’s failure to bring something novel to the table makes the scare attempts appear goofy.
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One could argue that the movie’s horror element is not situated in conventional mediums of sight or sound but in psychology: a mother, symbolic of warmth and nurture, is presented as an evil spirit; family, suggestive of home, is broken; ball pits, which are colourful and joyous, become claustrophobic; and the ocean, which symbolises a freer, new beginning, becomes a graveyard. Other Mommy probably places its jitters in turning safe spaces into eerie, vulnerable ones, but that is too generous an assumption to conclude the novelty of the movie, considering it resorts to typical imagery of unease like body horror and bloodbath to deliver the depth of edginess.
Film fails to deliver
The movie fiddles with the idea of personifying the emptiness that comes from being the child of a loveless marriage who doesn’t have all the answers they need or understand what they know. It also unpurifies the idea of innocence, but all of this fails to translate from paper to storytelling, which reasonably is Other Mommy’s biggest letdown.
The background score, like the movie, doesn’t do much to elevate it, but the cinematography manages to pull off a suspenseful ambience.
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They say imagination is scarier than reality, a premise which aptly fits the horror film genre, but Other Mommy fails to deliver. It sets up an interaction between the demon and the parents in the beginning, preventing us from imagining whether the demon is real or just exists in Bella’s head; it establishes the demon’s objectives, the scale of vulnerability the child is prone to, and the modus operandi the demon adopts to terrorise the family, all within the first act of the film, leaving no room for imagination.
